Flirting with the Zodiac

When I was a child, the Fifth Dimension told me it was the dawning of the “Age of Aquarius” and to “Let the Sun Shine.” My mother had me read her her horoscope from the newspaper every morning while she got ready for work. Even my grandmother read her daily horoscope.

During the Reagan Administration, Nancy Reagan had an astrologer helping her plan White House activities. All the Playboy Centerfolds shared their sun sign and, “Hey, Baby, what’s your sign?” had been an ice breaker in bars for more than a decade. By the time I was a teenager, I discovered Astrologer Linda Goodman and scoured her books for clues about myself and more importantly, those boys I wanted to date. My dad thought astrology was bull. He was a Sagittarius.

I’m a Cancer . . . on the prostate of the world. I frequently toss that out as an attempt at humor. Cancer The Disease stinks and who hasn’t had someone in their life affected by the Big C? Apparently, after Hippocrates used the terms carcinos and carcinoma to describe tumors that resembled the shape of a crab; Celsus, a Roman physician, translated these Greek terms into the Latin word for crab, “cancer.” Were I stricken with cancer, I would want to find a reason to laugh every single day.

Cancer, the Crab, the astrological sign for those of us born between the dates of June 22 - July 23 or June 21 - July 22 depending on the source, or perhaps the year. A water sign, ruled by the moon, its astrological symbol is supposed to represent a crab, but most everyone sees it as a sideways 69. My high school boyfriend’s father saw that symbol on my suede keychain and said that it represented what “queers” do. I pity his wife if he thought only “queers” engaged in such a position.

In her 1968 book, Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs, the first book on astrology to ever make the New York Times Best Seller list, she describes a Cancer woman as follows:

“She's just a little mad, slightly sad and superbly imaginative. She also knows how to save the shekels.” Regarding our Cancer laughter, “It giggles and gurgles, then finally erupts in a loud cackle that sounds exactly like two hundred hens laying two hundred perfect eggs.”

While I have always had a rather hearty guffaw, I read this sentence more than 40 years later and Hillary Clinton comes to mind. Hillary, a Scorpio, has a crazy cackle when she’s tickled. Or Kamala Harris, a Libra, whose lusty laughter caught the ire of conservative columnist, and former Reagan speechwriter, Peggy Noonan.

She's just a little mad

The words lunar, lunacy and looney all have the same root. Luna is the Roman Goddess of the Moon. Cancers are ruled by the moon and our moods ebb and flow like the tide based on the lunar cycle. All those years, I blamed my menstrual cycle for my mood swings. Madness indicates mental derangement and insanity. Where do we send the deranged and insane? The looney bin.

An animal afflicted with rabies is called “mad.” Mad is another word for angry and I have been insanely angry at times in my life. I was for a while this past weekend. Over something rather trivial, but I lost my head for a bit, thankfully no one witnessed this meltdown, but they do exist.

I can get a case of the “Mean Reds” as Holly Golightly called it when she was afraid and didn’t know of what or why. I always blamed hormones for these moods and my now deficit of estrogen is probably a factor, but there was a full moon Saturday night. Perhaps I should start paying closer attention to my moods and the cycle of the moon. I did see mention in one forum that February would be a tough month for Cancers, but it was time to cut useless ties, stop romanticizing the past and start romanticizing the future. Sounds like good advice.

Slightly sad and superbly imaginative

Slightly sad is a bit of an understatement. I can easily fall into the depths of despair and spend weeks wandering around the abyss. I can still function, and if pressed, put on a happy face and maybe even have fun for a while, but if I’m in a funk, I tend to stay there longer than necessary. I will wallow and marinate in it until I begin to bore myself. I think that’s pretty typical for a slow moving crab.

Once I stop brooding, I am ready to put the loon in lunatic! Moonchildren are known for their sense of humor and as previously noted, outrageous laughter. There isn’t much I like better than a big belly laugh and I usually am my own favorite target for a joke. We are also generous to a fault to those who truly need our help and time. Most of the time I am somewhere between the extremes of the depths and exuberance.

The crab is my totem. In addition to periodic crabiness, I also tend to move from side to side and try to avoid being backed into a corner. I am tenacious, sometimes to the point of clinginess. I live in a shell of self-protection.

I am not sure how superb my imagination is, but I can improvise. Depending on my audience, I can spin a yarn or tell a tall tale. I have a fair amount of skepticism and aside from affairs of the heart, I’ve never been taken in by a scam or snipe hunt.

She also knows how to save the shekels

Oy vey, not this Moonchild! I am quite the spendthrift and had a time in my life where the very idea of the debt I carried would send most crabs deep into the sand to recover from their fit of the vapors. I am not a “Save it for a rainy day” type woman like most Cancers. I might drown and I don’t want to die with a pile of unspent money. I want to have some fun. The “I might drown,” is a very Cancerian thought, but the rest of it sounds like something an Aries might say.

Who am I to say astrology is a pseudoscience? People have practiced it for millenia. Sailors looked to the stars to guide them around the world. Why not look to the stars to guide us to know our own self better? A skeptic might argue that in order to persuade us, Goodman uses poetry and astral imagery melded with characteristics that if they don’t match yours, are easily explained away by your Ascendant, or the location of your ruling planet in the solar system, or some other arcane aspect of astrology.

Astrology goes far beyond the little snippets of our daily horoscope and it might be interesting to do an in depth chart and then track how life actually coincides with my sign for a year or two. If nothing else, the subject of astrology is a conversation starter. Whether they love it or hate it, ask anyone their sign and you will learn a great deal about that person from that one question. In some ways, I am a very typical Cancer. In others, I am not. It’s probably that way for most people. As D.H. Lawrence once said, “We need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac. The zodiac is well worth flirting with.”