Cancer opens with the Moon's own cardinal water, the sign of the crab and its shell, and this first degree falls in Venus's decan and in the opening term still ruled by Mars, the planet the Egyptian bounds table gives the earliest degrees of Cancer to precisely because the sign itself has no natural claim on a malefic. The picture given for the degree is a vessel at sea whose crew take down the colors they have sailed under and run up different ones in their place, a public, deliberate act performed in view of everyone aboard rather than a private change of heart.
Marc Edmund Jones and Elsie Wheeler produced this scene between them in Balboa Park on a single day in 1925, Jones reading the blank degree aloud from a shuffled index card and Wheeler, who could barely turn her head for the arthritis that had disabled her, describing whatever came to her unprompted. The interpretation attached to the image today is Dane Rudhyar's, written in 1973 for An Astrological Mandala, not Jones's own 1953 wording, and it reads the flag change as a point of no return, an allegiance abandoned in one symbolic gesture rather than worn away by slow attrition. That is a generous reading of what could just as easily be desertion or expedience, changing colors because the wind has changed rather than because conviction has. Cancer's own concern, belonging and the people one answers to, is present either way; the degree simply insists that at the cardinal point of the year's most private sign, some loyalties get renounced in public, on deck, where they can be seen.