Cancer 7: Spirits Dancing by Moonlight

The Egyptian term changes hands here, Venus taking over from Mars at the seventh degree, while the Chaldean decan continues to belong to Venus across the whole first third of the sign, a fitting boundary degree for a scene about things normally unseen becoming visible. Two nature spirits dance under moonlight, which is to say Wheeler's image places invisible beings in plain view, dancing rather than working or fighting, under the Moon that rules the sign they are dancing in.

Jones set this down in Balboa Park in 1925 without commentary; the interpretation that reaches this page is Rudhyar's 1973 formulation, and it is one of the degrees where Rudhyar's more metaphysical, panoramic style of reading is easiest to see against Jones's own reputation as the more clinical of the two, focused on practical counseling rather than cosmic vision. There is little shadow explicitly attached to this degree in the record, though a dance performed by moonlight and unseen by anyone but the visionary raises its own quiet question about who else can see what she sees, and whether a truth has to be witnessed by more than one person to be trusted. Cancer's sensitivity to atmosphere and its native intimacy with the Moon make this degree feel less like an anomaly than like the sign momentarily speaking in its own native language.