5 Important Reasons To Rejoice: The Sun Enters Cancer

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Hey everyone, this is Acyuta-bhava from Nightlight Astrology. And today, we are going to talk about the summer solstice, which is the moment at which the Sun enters the sign of Cancer. Now, this is a talk that really is applicable for anyone anywhere, regardless of whether you're in the northern hemisphere and actually experiencing the summer solstice right now or not; maybe you're in the southern hemisphere. And, you know, it's the, it's the winter solstice. So, the point of this talk, got my little Hawaiian shirt on the point of this talk is to discuss the symbolism, this zodiacal symbolism of the Summer Solstice, or zero Cancer, the sign of Cancer, and the symbolism of the moon, in general. So again, I truly believe that there this is applicable. Of course, it's, it's, in some ways, you know, this is seasonal to the summer solstice, in the Southern Hemisphere, when you hit that, you know, the longest day of the year, and you're in the southern hemisphere, you might notice some of these themes, or feel them a little bit more vividly because you literally see the sunlight at its sort of maximum. But what we're really talking about is archetypal and symbolic. So it's important that you not feel like you're left out of all of this symbolism somehow if you're not in the northern hemisphere. Anyway, that being said, we're going to talk today about five things that the summer solstice teaches us or the zero Cancer or the sign of Cancer in general, or five reasons to rejoice. I believe that there is a lot of very joyful energy in the sign of Cancer. This is the place where Jupiter is exalted. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about what I think some of the most joyful elements of the sign of Cancer are as a cancer son myself; this is kind of fun, but also the summer solstice as a seasonal time of year and what that sort of evokes, so don't forget to like and subscribe, share your comments and click on the notification bell for updates. You can always find a transcript of my daily talk on my website, nightlight astrology.com.

Okay, so five things the summer solstice teaches us are five reasons to rejoice. Remember, what is the Zodiac? Well, the Zodiac, in part, is the great circle of the solar year, that is, the ecliptic, the path of the Sun moving around us from our geocentric perspective. And that great circle, then, you know, sort of broken into 12 parts reflective of the roughly 12 Lunation Cycles in a solar year, as well as the 12 you couldn't say solar steps that the Sun takes throughout the year. What's really cool about the Zodiac is that so much of what we know about the signs, you know, you learn lists, like okay, this is what Leo means or this is what Virgo means or whatever. But a lot of those lists we don't ever stop to go like, Well, where did they come from? Or what's the, you know, what's the logic or rationale behind like, where did this? Where Did anyone come up with all this stuff? And I like to think, especially because this is something I've reflected on a lot, that a lot of it comes down to the different archetypal stages that ancient astrologers were observing in the solar year in terms of the alternation between light and dark. So as the Sun makes its yearly round, there is an alternation of, like 12 steps of light and dark and the interaction of light and dark. For example, from the sign of Aries, the start of the Zodiac, all the way to through Virgo, we have the light half of the year. This is northern hemisphere centric, but the symbolism is universally applicable. This is a divinity very symbolic language; some can't emphasize that enough. But from the standpoint of the Northern Hemisphere, we observe this archetypal circular alternation of light and dark. And remember that that cycle isn't causing things to happen. It's symbolic. It's like a mirror of things that are happening. And that's why you don't have to be tied into it literally by hemisphere. You don't have to reorient the Zodiac. I don't personally have a problem with people do reorient it; I just don't think it has to be done. At any rate, you get Aries through Virgo, and you're on the light half of the year where there is more light than darkness in the 24-hour period. You hit Libra all the way through Pisces, and now you're on the dark half of the year where there's more dark in the 24-hour period than there is light.

Within that light and dark half of the year. There is a period during the light half of the year when the light is rising. And then there's a period on the light half of the year where the light is waning. So from Aries through Gemini, the light is gaining every day. The days are getting longer, and the light that sort of the yang power is growing from Cancer through Virgo. The light is now waning from the summer solstice through the sign of Cancer, Leo Virgo; the light is symbolically waning in the archetypal construction of the Zodiac. So if you go on the other side of the Year from Libra through Sagittarius, you have the darkness gaining, so you have darkness growing, it's like yeah, it's like Yin rising. And then, from Capricorn through Pisces, you have Yin waning; from the winter solstice through Pisces, the light is coming back, which means the darkness is now waning. So you have a light half in a dark half, you have light growing and light fading, you have on the dark half, dark growing and dark sort of fading, fading, or waxing and waning, you could put it either way. And then within each cycle, within each three parts cycle, so say Aries through Gemini, you also have very beautiful developments. And the development of light and dark through those three stages within one quarter of the year are also nuanced and really interesting. And it's my opinion that the archetypal signatures of light and dark and their interactions were probably foundational to the entire since probably so much of the way that the Zodiac was structured. I'm getting over a cold from traveling. Excuse me, so always fun when you pick up a cold while traveling. So what is happening at the summer solstice, in particular, the light has reached its maximum, and we're now turning within the light half of the year from light rising to the light starting to fade or wane or die. It's a really interesting moment; you have the most amount of light, the Sun moving further and further up in the sky, the arc of the Sun in the sky getting higher and higher, making the day longer. As it gets close in the northern hemisphere, we see it growing upward toward the pole star. And that was all symbolic for ancient astrologers of the Sun and the light and eternity. So the Sun Life, light, eternity, the eternal nature of being of the soul of God of the gods of creation, that the further up you got toward that unchanging Pollstar, and the maximum amount of light that symbolically that was close to the idea of divinity, or the eternal nature of life and the soul and so forth, which is relatively unchanging, and sort of fixed, and it's symbolically associated with light, like an eternal spark.

What starts happening in the sign of Cancer, the sign of the moon, is that the light starts to fade, or the Sun starts to descend. And you have to remember that in ancient astrology, the soul was said to sort of descend from spirit into matter; when conception occurs, the soul enters the womb and, you know, comes from the Spiritual World back into the material world. I mean, even though that is sort of misleading because there's a sense in which the material world is spiritual, right? It's not like they're just this; there's this hard line between the two. But for now, for the sake of keeping it simple, just imagine that the spirit comes back into matter. It descends back down; somehow, these visual metaphors don't. I don't recommend taking them too literally. But just like the light is now descending, on the light half of the year, the soul was said to descend into a body into matter which was all loosely associated with the sublunary sphere. That means the sphere that is from the moon down into the Earth, so we take a body, and we come into the sublunary sphere. As the light is coming down again, we move into the sign that is associated with birth; Cancer, the sign of the moon, which is related to the body, the moon ruled the body the moon ruled, was most closely associated with the earthly sort of material nature that we find ourselves in the moon associated with the gestational ground of the womb, that and the mother that we're born into. This is the exultation place of Jupiter, the planet most associated with sperm and fertility and a planet that is exalted here in the sign of the moon. In part because it's a fertile place, a watery place for Jupiter, the God of growth. I mean, one of the reasons that I heard someone say this recently, and it really stuck with me.

One of the reasons in Indian astrology that Jupiter is associated with both childbirth and sperm and procreation and the Guru is because they all have to do with birthing like generation after generation after generation. So you know that the parents have the children, and they pass down, the ancestral seed proliferates and is passed down. And in that way, it stays alive. And it grows. Gurus also, in teaching students who teach students who teach students pass on the seed of wisdom, you know, one generation after another. So that's a really interesting explanation that I heard an Indian astrologer give recently. But this beautiful place of all signs, all the signs are beautiful in their own way. But this beautiful sign of Cancer is associated with the descent of spirit down into the sublunary sphere into the gestational matrix of life into biology into blood and flesh into the womb and the world. A place teeming with the birth of forms the one in a sense, associated with the light, the summer solstice, the pole star that the Sun is closest to; at this time of year, all starts coming in, and the one becomes many, so proliferates. Jupiter exalted in the sign, the moon rules, the sign, it's watery, it's feminine, beautiful symbolism, right? Well, there are five things that we can take from this, in my opinion, probably more. But these are five things anyway that I take from this that are an intimate part of my daily spiritual life that I hope that you will find inspiring.

Number One. So this idea that we all come from and return to the same source, if there's anything beautiful about the Zodiac that you could start with, it's that it's this circle of the alternation of light and dark. And it goes around and around, and it gives us this picture, plus Plato said, time is the moving image of eternity. And there's this sense that we go out from, and we return to the source, the womb, home, the soul. Life is a series of adventures where we move through different states of separation only to return. And if there's anything that I'm reminded of, you know, right now, in Minnesota, where I live, wherever you may live, it's the summer solstice. So there's just this feeling of like, I'm back home. You know, for me, I love sunlight. I love water. I love the beach. I love how it feels to have the sunroof open on my car; you know what I mean? I don't, you know, probably a lot of you guys live; you might live in climates where it's like that all the time. But in Minnesota, you know, it gets really cold in the winters are long and dark. When the light returns, and that is a metaphor, it doesn't have to be seasonally fixed. It's an archetype. But when the light returns, it's like, I'm back home, whatever that looks like, you know, for some people, the light returning might be just coming back to a familiar people or place or things that you love to do.

But there's one thing that I can trust; it's that, you know, the Sun will rise again. And the light does return over and over though, you know, we go through periods of darkness, obscurity, doubt, mystery, there's something so comforting, very Cancerian word, right? About knowing that we all come from, we go out from, and return to the same source, we all have the need every day to return to the same well. Nourishment, you know, for some of us that it's if you look at it really deeply, you can actually feel that it's not very different from what children need in their mothers or their fathers, their parents. We all need that. And we all return to it, and somehow life has a way of bringing us back to the water, bringing us back to the place that we came from. And I take great comfort in that. It's like it always comes back, and if there's anything that I can have faith in, it's that the light will come back again at some point. This is the nature of eternity, you know, reflecting on itself through the constant variation and cycles and changes of life that we see in this universe, this beautiful universe.

Number two, well, the sign of Cancer implies separation from the source, coming into a form coming into a body coming into a mother. And then, just like we're separating, in some way, perhaps from oneness or from a spiritual state into a material state. However, we want to conceptualize it, there's pain involved in that, you know, the umbilical cord is cut, when you come out of your mother, you cling to her, but you have to, you have to learn to individuate, you have to learn, you know, but what's so beautiful about that hurt of separation. So often, we talk about that separation as sin, or we talk about it as, you know, ignorance or something flawed in us or something like that. And then there's a lot of blame. I think, ironically, that sometimes there's a kind of self-centeredness in thinking of ourselves as so fallen and sinful and bad. And like, it's like, you know, maybe it's just as simple as life, naturally involving states of separation and union. How do we spiritualize that reality of separation and union, rather than thinking, Oh, the separation is somehow my fault, and heroically through steps and overcoming and achieving, and spiritual ambition, I overcome some original fault, and then, you know, and then I'm home again, and I'll never have to leave again or something like that? My feeling with this sign the sign of Cancer, being Cancer, Sun native myself, and reflecting on the seasons of life, especially as I'm older, and I have kids now and, and, you know, observe children and parenting. And to me, that separation is that separation, is it properly understood, it's like radar, it's always guiding us back home, you don't want it to be so loud, you know that you can't walk on your own, that you're not, you don't develop some kind of independence. But it's also really important to keep close to that cry, that little child-like cry, like a dog or a baby crying for connection. Because it's that same feeling of separation, that it's always it guides us through everything in it keeps us pointed, it's like a North Star. You know, not surprisingly, We're descending away from the North Star. But the separation we feel somehow if we keep close to it, don't try to solve it or fix it permanently. But allow for that ache to be sweet, then it serves this beautiful purpose throughout our lives. It's bittersweet. It's always redirecting us to keep us on the path home and to see each other in the same light. So the hurt of separation is also the devotion that we use to find our way back home.

Number three, remembering is an act of devotion. The moon was associated with remembrance why because it is not an original light but a reflective light. You could say it's like a copy of an original. I think in that way, you can see why ancient astrologers would associate it with memory and remembrance. A child is a sort of like a copy of a parent, the child walking around outside of the mother's womb is always connected through the mother's memory to have, you know, gestated inside. At least kind of ideally, not all mothers are great at being moms for a lot of different reasons, you know, and sometimes we have a lot of hurt around our moms. But you know, in a nice sort of ideal archetypal sense, the mother remembers the child and the source and the union that the child came from; the child remembers that in the mother. And so, in bhakti-yoga, we say that mothers are one of the pinnacle archetypal images of devotion. If you want to learn how to be devoted to God, to others, to live to, you know goodness in the world, to your job, to your kids, to yourself. Try to remember and foster a devoted remembrance of the things that you care about. You know, some people say to me because you know, I've had a daily mantra meditation practice for quite a long time now and before that a meditation practice and yoga practice and an Ayahuasca practice and blah, blah, blah. And, you know, and I work out, and I have these daily rituals. And so you wouldn't believe how many people are like, Oh, that must be your Capricorn moon. And I'm like, yeah, there's, there's definitely a part of me that like the Capricorn Moon is like, very structured, and, you know, that's part of it, but I have a cancer sun. And the best part of my spiritual routines, if we want to call them that, are really about devotion, not about discipline; they're about devotion. And there's a slight adjustment that I find myself having to make when my Capricorn moon sometimes, you know, like, wants to take over. It's not good enough; it's not serious enough. Are you getting anywhere doing this? You know, are you developing a reputation for having done this? You know, and it's like, the cancer sun comes back, and it's like, are you joyful? You know, like, are you going to the well and drawing up life-giving, nourishing water? Is this practice an act of remembrance and devotion? That's a beautiful thing about the sign of Cancer. And the remembrance and devotion implied in the sign. In this world, everything is available as a form of remembrance; like anything, if we look at it with the eyes of devotion, it can remind us of our divine original source because it's spread out everywhere for us to see. And remembrance is a way of seeing the same essence reflected in the many.

You'll find that many people have many different spiritual traditions, regardless of what form it takes, have as the defining characteristic of their faith path devotion. The Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, when I think of my Teresa of Avila, Mother Teresa, other people that, you know, many people have looked to as sources of spiritual inspiration. And, of course, I'm just naming some that like I'm familiar with, but what do I see that they all have in common? And I see devotion. I see care in, in their activities, you know, both the mundane stuff and the spiritual stuff; there's an aura of care. This is probably due to the fact that, again, if we think of it through a Cancerian lens, the Dalai Lama is a cancer sun, by the way. We can think that there there is a sense of keeping close to them. The remembrance of something that, at times, we can feel so far from, so disconnected from, and the need to keep that close.

Number four, the mountain needs the valley; the spirit needs the soul. We went on this yoga retreat as a family; I got sick. So I was thinking about that because, you know, spiritual retreats are often like a mountaintop experience. I remember when I was a kid growing up in the church, I used to go on church retreats with, you know, the youth group and the youth ministers would say, this is a mountaintop experience. I don't know if you guys ever heard that phrase, but the mountain is the peak, like where the Sun you can almost touch it. It's like the summer solstice. And there are lots of peak experiences. But we always end up having to descend down the mountain back into the valley. This is something that James Hillman wrote about at length in a famous essay he wrote called peaks and valleys or peaks and valleys. And the valley is the place of wounding, the place of separation, the place of the many rather than the one, but also the place of the soul, the place of utter uniqueness, the place of the place where, you know, Hawaiian shirts, and shaving cuts, you know, so I thought I was talking with I see a Jungian therapist, and I was talking to him about my experience, traveling and I said, there were so many ways in which I was Well to refresh my practice of bhakti by being on this retreat, and it was, it was so good. And I was like, so high from it, you know, but then I got sick on the way home. And I initially felt so angry, like, in my posts, like, Why do I have to be sick? You know, like, part of it's because, you know, my daughter got sick and then it's like, okay, one of those two girls get sick, we all go down within a week, you know, or even shorter. And it's like, you know, they're at that stage where they're building their immune systems for like, the past year, I've, I don't think, you know, up until like, having kids like, I never got colds, I was like, I was like, fine. Having kids and I'm sick like every couple of weeks anyway, so I said, you know, but it but what I was reminded of and talking to my therapist, was that all the spirits up high. And, you know, blissed-out, there's something about coming down into the valley, you have to come down, and it's it hurts. You know, and I came home, and I was angry that I got sick and stuff like that. I felt like I barely had any energy in the first video that I made coming home, which was yesterday's video on the Dao De Jing for astrologers. And if you guys sense that or not, like, I was like, pissed, you know? Anyway, let's try not to talk too much about myself here. But the message that I got was like, you know, it's the mark of life. It's the birthmark. The birthmark is what makes sure that we don't lose the other indivisible uniqueness. There's something so impatient about trying to rush off into oneness and the glory of the mountaintop sunlight. And it's like, but for that to be for that space, that spiritual light to be, truly deeply, in most intimately relished. It has to come into the uniqueness of the soul, which can only take place through, you know, the, in the Christ image, it's the spear in the side of the crown of thorns or the crucifixion. There's a sense of having, you know, in, even in Christian thought, this idea of gnosis of God, emptying out and coming down into the valley of tears, so to speak, it's like, this place is the reason that we're able to, you know, have a spiritual identity, that's nobody else's. It's not just about some, you know, white-out oneness, the reason that we're able to receive from that beauty, some individualized form, which is just precious is because, you know, we go through separation, we that's, it's a part of it, it's, there's a birth canal for every birth, you know. So, the mountain top needs the valley; the spirit needs the soul. Think about the spirit as the mountain top; you think about the soul is the valley below where life in the village is happening. This is the moon and Sun's alchemical marriage.

Number five. What is astrology doing as a whole? I believe, of course, I'm saying this as a Cancerian sort of astrologer that astrology silver's our consciousness, this was an alchemical precursor necessary step on the route to gold, that you can't develop gold without going through a stage of silver. I take this as a metaphor. And I think about it. Psychologically speaking, James Hillman also wrote about this in an essay; I think it was called Silver in the White Earth. But in that essay, he says, the ability to see the world psychologically in terms of myth, metaphor, symbol, in film and art and in everyday life, the ability to develop that reflective awareness of the, you know, the eternal archetypes the gods in and through everything, that what we're doing when we learn to live and see that way, is we're silvering our consciousness; that this is a kind of lunar activity. That being here in the world again individualizes us, that you can't skip that stage. You can't skip that stage of becoming a spiritual person. You know, that it's, it's not becoming spirit. It's becoming a spiritual person. The personhood being so utterly unique and so. So forged in the cycles of the moon, this is why in bhakti-yoga, for example, Krishna, who is said to be the, you know, descends an avatar who comes into this world is the planet is the moon. So, the, you know, when we in, in bhakti-yoga when we talk about God as a person, the, in my opinion, one of the main reasons that we do so is to emphasize that our goal is not to lose our own personhood. Our goal is not to shed the terrible thing called personality and individuality, which a lot of people will in sort of new-age equal cluster group right into the sense that it's bad to have an ego. Like, okay, the ego may be temporary, the ego may have issues with being self-centered, it may forget the eternal nature of itself and other beings, and so forth. But it is not bad to be a person. Right? And so, the thing I take away from this is that by studying the planets every day, whether we're talking about the symbolism of the moon and the summer solstice, or we're talking about any other sign, the idea is that by doing so, by tracking out the planets every day, day, in, day out, month, in month out throughout the year, what, why are we doing this? Is it just because we're obsessed about the future? How shallow would that be? I think it's both and, you know, we are obsessed with the future. I don't think it's necessarily wrong to be anxious or interested in the future, or in, you know, different weather fronts, archetypal, energetically, I think it's fine.

But also, what the ancient astrologers said about astrology, is very similar to this idea of silvering. That we're we are, we are learning to see the divine, the universe is becoming sacred, because we're learning to see it as such, and that the planets and the gods moving, are showing us that divine essence within all of our day to day experiences. And that the sense of, let's call it an astrological faith, that the cosmos is a well-organized, beautiful, intelligent, divine arrangement. And that, that includes my own personhood, that includes all of my experiences, those that are separated relatively are those that are relatively more joined. And in this way, you know, we evolve spiritually we, there's something alchemical that starts happening to us when we learn to see ourselves in life and each other in this way. And to me, a lot of that is reflected in the beautiful, the summer solstice, and the imagery of the maximal light and the beginning of the descent of light back into form in the world. So, I hope that you guys have enjoyed this meditation on the summer solstice in the sign of Cancer.
That's what I've got for today, and we'll have some bhakti Wednesday coming up as well. Alright, take it easy, everyone. Bye