Mars Is About To Revisit Cancer — A Retrograde Rewind — Horoscopes For All 12 Signs

Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology [https://nightlightastrology.com/].

Today we are going to take a look at Mars's upcoming entrance into the sign of Cancer. This is the first time that Mars has been in the sign of Cancer since a very long period of time that Mars spent, including a retrograde in the sign of Cancer in 2025, going even back to the autumn of 2024.

So we're going to revisit that time period and refresh you on things, give you a list of things to watch for, and I'm going to do some brief horoscopic reminders of what house Mars in Cancer will land in in your birth chart, so that you can start thinking about this transit.

It is probably the most powerful Mars placement of the year, especially because of the strong echoes it's likely to bring up for a lot of us, dating back to that retrograde. So we'll look at all of this today, and hopefully this will be useful for you.

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Here we are on Achepso. I've isolated just Mars, and we're going to take this forward right now. Mars is in the last decan of Gemini, as we sit the very almost very beginning of August here.

But what I want to make note of is here we are about Tuesday, August 11th, the day before our solar eclipse in Leo, and we have Mars entering the sign of Cancer. This is the sign of Mars's depression or fall, so that alone can make this a tricky combination, and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment.

But aside from the dignity, one of the reasons that this also stands out is that from September of 2024. Excuse me, there's a typo here. Let me fix that. There, now my banner's fixed. September 2024 to April of 2025, we also had a very long stay from Mars in Cancer.

Now I am going to take you back to the very beginning of September 2024. Well, this is September 2024. The ingress occurred right about here. We're looking at September 4th into the 5th of 2024.

Now you're going to notice that Mars moves pretty slowly through every sign. It's like about 40 days or more that Mars can spend in a sign. And as Mars is moving through Cancer, it's actually slowing down in October, then it briefly entered Leo, so we had a little bit of like a Leo interlude, and then it slowed down and ended up staying for a while because of the slow speed.

It retrograded in Leo in early December of 2024. You may remember the Mars-Pluto opposition was pretty intense around that time, and then it retrogrades back into Cancer. This retrograde into Cancer in early January then meant that Mars is going to spend another long period of time in Cancer.

So the retrograde in the sign of Cancer lasts from early January all the way up to here we go. The station was right about February 25, 24th. So then, Mars turns direct in Cancer. Remember, this is a more difficult Mars because of the Moon Mars combination being a more sort of a more intense planetary dyad.

So we'll talk about that, but Mars finally leaves Cancer. This is April what? April 17 was it? About April 17. So from September 2024 to April of 2025, with a little bit of a Leo interlude from December into January, Mars spent an enormous amount of time in the sign of Cancer.

So the first thing that I want you to do right now, before we talk more about this transit, what you can expect from it, is to just think in terms of that period of time. What was happening in your life around that period of time that coincides with the following themes we're about to talk about that we're going to discuss with respect to the Mars in Cancer archetype.

If you do that alone, you're going to put yourself in the space that you need to be in for understanding what topics might have resonance or a kind of echo or parallel timeline coming up now. That does not mean that if difficult things happened in the past along that timeline, that the same exact things are going to happen.

I don't mean that, but what I do mean is that the same kinds of tensions or vulnerable spaces, quite frankly, may come up again, and it's just good to be aware of that. And I think it's good to be aware of that at a time like right now, as opposed to me doing this, you know, on the day that Mars enters Cancer.

Surprise! Hey, this has this great historical echo, and we gave you no time to, you know, kind of prepare yourself psychically for it. So that's why we're doing this today. But next, what I want to do is just talk about what makes the Moon and Mars a difficult pairing.

Let's think about this from a variety of different standpoints. First of all, the moon in the sign of Cancer is in that sign Mars is in its fall, and the moon is in its fall in Scorpio in the sign of Mars. So this pairing is intentional, and it has to do with the combination of the Moon and Mars as planets and archetypes.

They are not completely incompatible because all opposites have a kind of secret sameness to them. In fact, it's like yin and yang. There's a little speck of white in the black and black in the white that means that the two things are not completely polarized; that they share an affinity with one another.

You know, if you've ever looked at, I love using the example of a fractal visualizer. You pull one up on YouTube, and you can look at it, and you can say, "Is everything moving, or is everything staying the same?" And that question philosophically is kind of like a brain riddle because on one level obviously it looks like everything is moving, but often if you look at the center, it looks like nothing is moving, and that's like a almost like a visual optical illusion.

But opposites work this way, and ancients were well aware of that. Mystics have always been well aware of that. That opposites, although they appear like just things that can't stand each other or that polarize, also have a secret affinity.

So let's say that for starters, because we're not trying to make Moon and Mars out to be just completely incompatible, like battling opposites, and that's important because we ultimately want to learn how to hold the tension of the opposites such that they have that affinity and sameness working as a kind of creative tension.

That's the goal of working with all opposites. However, it doesn't help to bury our head in the sand and not be aware of how opposites tend to polarize. And this is specifically what's behind all of the language of essential dignities.

It has to do with types of planetary dyads, dichotomies, polarities that can exist, and our awareness of them is specifically what alchemizes them, so that creative tension is held. So, being aware of Moon Mars tension in our lives when Mars is in the sign of Cancer, or when the moon is in the sign of Scorpio, they're basically inverted versions of the same thing.

But what are they speaking to? They're speaking to the moon as the cradle of life, as the matrix and homeostasis of ecological life. It's the breath moving in and out. Valens compares the moon to the kind of circulation of life, and we have the moon as the web weaver of life.

We have the moon as the mother and the womb, and we have the moon as nurturer and connector, and then we have Mars as scissors, right? And I always like to use the example of Mars as the severing eventually, one way or another, whether it was with seashells, and that's actually a thing, or if now it's with scissors, but the umbilical cord eventually has to fall off.

It has to be separated. So Mars, as a separating principle, is not necessarily antithetical to life, but it does mean that life includes separation, and separation and life are tricky opposites, because life wants to join things together and create this kind of wave pattern of safety and of the breath and the circulation of the blood and the sustainment and nourishment of life and the connective tissue psychically and emotionally, and the moon is sort of the mediatrix of that.

Well, Mars is severing and cutting. Mars is individual and apart. Mars is conflict and hostility, but also Mars's independence, bravery and courage. So it's not like Mars is evil, but if you ask most of us, if you were to say, would you prefer a Moon in Scorpio kind of day or a Moon in Cancer kind of day when it comes to the feeling of connectivity?

Most of us, if you honestly observe your experiences during both days, will find that the connective flow, in sense of ease and sort of harmony emotionally and circumstantially is a little bit flowier in Cancer than it is in Scorpio, and the reason for that is simple: we tend to prefer the experience of life as this kind of fluid medium.

It's like resting in the amniotic ocean of the mother, as opposed to the crisis of the birth canal, where individuation occurs and severing or separation from the mother happens. Now, is one more natural than another? No, they're all part of life. Death is part of life.

We will be severed or cut, spirit soul from body eventually, which is why Mars was also exalted in the sign of Capricorn, where the moon is in its detriment, and that sign was called the Gateway of the Gods, where it was thought that as the light is gradually rising out of the darkness, that that is the pathway to the ascent of spirit out of matter.

All traditions around planet Earth have some version of enlightenment. You go to be with the ancestors. You go to Valhalla. You cross the far shore, Nirvana, heaven. Interestingly, Capricorn, as the gateway of the gods, is associated with the severing of the spirit soul from the body and the rise out of matter, which is why the sea goat rises out of the ocean and climbs up the mountain toward the stars.

This sign is a really enigmatic sign that people frequently just associate with people building skyscrapers, which is like a material version of the same impulse. But the spiritual impulse of Capricorn, the gateway of Saturn, the gateway of Mars, exalted there, antithetical to the Moon, because the Moon is here in the Valley of Life.

It's not interested in exiting the body. It's interested in sustaining it. So these are all metaphors. They're all archetypal images that help us understand the dichotomy between the moon and Mars. The point is, when Mars goes through Cancer, you often get really intense experiences where things that are your preferred sort of homeostasis, your sweet spots, your nest, women, children, the breast, vulnerability, your sweet little tummy, all these the soft interior spaces of the crab.

Those spaces, we now have to deal with the archetype of severing, severance, individuation, cutting, conflict, confrontation, and that's not an easy environment or match for these two planets. However, some beautiful, beautiful things can happen here.

So, for example, recently, I saw an astrologer of some notability and whose work I respect, saying, you know, talking about essential dignities and saying, well, Mars in these dignities, you know, he was sort of criticizing them a little bit, saying like you know Lionel Messi had Mars in Cancer, was he somehow terrible at sports? No, he's like the goat.

You know, but we don't understand that. That's not what dignities are actually pointing to. It's not saying if you have Mars in Cancer, you can't be successful athletically, or you're going to be just like a passive wussy or something. You know, wussy. Does anyone remember that? I feel like that's like a throwback to like sixth grade or something.

Anyway, I'm sure that's not an appropriate word anymore. But you know, people imagine that Mars in Cancer means oh, it weakens your Mars function or something. That's not what it's talking about. Instead, we're talking about certain archetypal tensions that will occur.

For example, Lionel Messi, when he was young, had an HGH deficiency and he wasn't going to grow, so he had to take exogenous human growth hormone in his leg, painful injections like every day to get himself to grow. That's Mars in Cancer.

When you're talking about the inability to individuate out of a more like his youth, in other words, his growth was sort of being stunted. It was like I have to grow, but I can't grow. That is a classic Mars in Cancer kind of dichotomy.

Another thing, like another example of this, would be Michael Phelps, I believe, who had Mars in Cancer. Obviously, tremendous athlete, and people say, "Well, see, his Mars function isn't damaged." Well, it's not his Mars function that's damaged. It's talking about a specific type of karma.

For example, with swimming for Michael Phelps, he has openly talked about something that he did in order to keep himself mentally and emotionally stable, because he tended toward depression and anxiety. And when swimming was done, and he didn't have swimming in his life, he started having substance issues and all sorts of other issues that he related specifically to not having swimming in his life any longer.

That's what we're talking about. We're not saying someone doesn't have a strong Mars. We're talking about certain kinds of tensions that it can express in so many different ways, but it has to do with understanding the tension that exists between the Moon and Mars as archetypes.

So now I think a lot of if essential dignities were that simple, like oh you've got a weak Venus or something, like yes that would be just so stupid, right? That's not what dignities are about. They're telling us about certain kinds of archetypal tensions that exist between planetary dyads, and those dyads can work together and often do.

But the dyads that have to do with detriment or fall are talking about things that have to be overcome because of the typical way that the tension provides a unique kind of polarization that is thought to be, you know, not as harmonious as other kinds of planetary pairings.

So with Mars in Cancer, just keep that in mind. We're talking about vulnerable spaces dealing with a more confrontational planet. The best version of that, I always have said for a long time, is like a mother bear, a very protective guardian of home, of family, of women, of children, advocacy for women's rights, fantastic example of Mars in Cancer.

But nonetheless, you wouldn't have something to advocate for if there weren't predators that were not kind to women and children, or Mars in Cancer advocating for immigrants, people who are refugees. Well, why would you have to do that if there weren't people who were prejudiced or afraid of people from other places in the world?

You can't. Even the most positive virtues of Mars in Cancer don't really exist without the underlying tension being a part of the blessing, which is just our awareness of these things that help us understand archetypes.

So any little class on Mars in Cancer. You can imagine the kinds of things that came up in my chart, third house of siblings, and my sister had a really serious health incident while that was while Mars was spending that long period of time in Cancer.

But that does not mean I'm sitting here worried about my sister again. Could something happen? Yeah, of course it's the same house, so you never know. But it's not that the exact same thing is going to happen. It's that those experiences archetypally are coming back, and it's the first time they're coming back since we all took a master class in Mars in Cancer. Does that make sense? Okay.

So on that note, what I want to do next is we are going to walk ourselves through. And now, let actually, you know what I should do? I should outline the length of time that Mars is going to spend in Cancer because I haven't done that yet. So let's put Nickepso back up on the screen.

So Mars in Cancer enters the day before the eclipse. Does that is that telling? I wouldn't put it past this eclipse to bring up some pretty vulnerable spaces for us. Why? Because Mars is entering Cancer the day before the solar eclipse in Leo, so that's context in the sky that we can't just, you know.

You could, it's fun to understand archetypes by putting them in vacuums. I do it all the time on the channel, but context is really important when you're looking at something like an eclipse. This is one big piece of context in the sky.

This is why I think we looked yesterday at the Leo eclipse storyline that could be coming up around the heart, but the heart paired against, paired next to, I should say, the Mars in Cancer dynamic. So, Mars in Cancer enters the day before the eclipse, and then we get it staying all the way.

What's this? September? So we get it moving into Leo. This looks like September 28. See, that's a long time, right? It's like that. That's taking us from mid August all the way through the end of September, and that's why I say it's usually often it's like 40 days plus 40 to 55 days, something like that, that Mars will spend in a sign. That's a long period of time.

Now, is it as long as the 2425 period of time? No, but there will be echoes. So let's take a look right now at what some of those echoes might be. And I'm going to put on the screen. I'm going to put us back to the day of the ingress, which doesn't really matter what I show on the screen, I guess. But let's put it to August 11th.

So, August 11th, and I'm going to go and just give you some quick reminders. And I want you to specifically take some time, if you have it, to journal and write about your journey from September 2024 to April 2025, especially January, February of well the fall like September October November of 2024 and then January February of 2025 in particular those were the big meaty times of Mars in Cancer.

Okay but let's give you some house topic reminders. If you're an Aries Sun or rising, it's the fourth house, home, family, roots, domestic life, the resting place. It's your living space. If you're a Taurus, it's siblings. It's the immediate environment. It's things like cars or vehicles.

It's your mind. It's your intellect. It's your speech. It's your subjective center of being. It's competition on a certain like Indian astrology. It's related to competition and skill development, relationships with peers. For if you're a Gemini rising or Sun, either way, it's the second house, which is things like assets and resources.

Maybe some overlap between things like family, home, money, income, expenditures, resources, what supports you or sustains you materially. If you're a Cancer, then it's your body, it's your health, it's your personal sense of identity, and it could be a period of time where there's almost like an encounter with yourself and with the topic of your health, vitality, and psychology.

Your character development is key. If you're a Leo, this is in the 12th house, which means it's all of the shadow topics. It's all of the unconscious material. It could help to take some time for retreat or solitude, and you also want to think about what is undermining you emotionally, spiritually, psychologically that you need to look at and potentially remove.

But it's a visitation of the shadow or blind spot in the chart in the 12th. And also, if sorry, if you're a Virgo Sun or rising, then we put this into the 11th house: friends, groups, communities, allies, colleagues, and what defines social ambition, vision, or success for the future. That's all the topics of the 11th house that are coming into view.

There could be some echoes again, going back to 24 and 25. If you are a Libra, then we're talking about the 10th house, the place of career, vocation, and the public sphere. How do you show up in the world? What is your sense of influence or participation in the society that you live in, as well as again, most likely career topics.

Now, if you're a Scorpio Sun or rising, it's the ninth house, which is the place of religion, philosophy, teachers, and teaching, education, and enlightenment. So, how is spirituality coming up for you right now, or learning, or teaching, or even traveling abroad?

Now, if you're a Sagittarius, this is in the eighth house. So, those deeper kind of karmic soul level contracts that are coming up. I remember my mom is a Sagittarius rising, and you know when Mars was in here, she was so worried about my sister's mortality because of the health event my sister endured.

Now she was okay, but I noticed that a significant portion of this journey was my mom's preoccupation with death, you know, and her own too. Like it just brings up when people go through things, eighth house things can just bring up that vulnerable feeling of like I'm deeply attached to people and things in my life.

It's not easy to know that I'm going to have to let go of them at some day, but attachments, relinquishment of attachments, positive versus negative attachments, and soul contracts with others. For Capricorns, it's love and relationships, it's sexuality, it's intimacy, it's your interpersonal sphere.

So think about what are you confronting in that area of life. What is a spouse or lover going through? For Aquarians, it's the sixth house, work, labor, sacrifice. What do you care about that you're giving yourself to wholeheartedly, emotionally, and what's draining you, or just like what are the energy vampires in your life right now?

Is it your work? Is it certain relationships? The sixth house is about meaningful effort, meaningful sacrifice, things that you really care about emotionally. That becomes really important. And then, if you're a Pisces Sun or rising, it's the fifth house.

It's children, it's creativity, it's the arts, it's sensual and creative fulfillment, and it's about what has emotional resonance versus what's draining your creative life force right now. It's also looking at things that feel like are there things you could improve about your health or your vitality that allow you to feel more creatively happy and fulfilled.

I find that when difficult transits through the fifth house come, we often have the ability to heal places in our lives that are otherwise prohibiting us from creative flow. So think about that if you're a Pisces. Now those are just brief reminders.

I want everyone really to spend some time thinking about those house topics with respect to the adventure of life that we all went on, you know, with that Mars retrograde in 2025 and the long stay in 2024. Again, the idea here is not to be scared, but to know, okay, I'm, you know, it's like a spiral staircase.

We're going around the same part of the spiral, but we're up a level, perhaps. That doesn't mean that we won't go through any difficulty, but it does mean we're probably wiser from the experiences we went through before. And so, can we start preparing our heart? Okay, I'm going back to Mars in Cancer School. What will that bring up for me?

One of the things that I find really fascinating. I'll share this because I think it's a good example. Is that when I was in that Mars retrograde Cancer period, I went through a very long period of what in bodybuilding is called recomposition, and recomposition often means that you're kind of trying to maintain muscle or even build a little bit of muscle while shedding body fat.

It's kind of like a cut in bodybuilding, which means like you're trying to lose fat and get as lean as possible. But this was a long process in which I didn't get to feel super strong. I didn't get to feel like I was building. I didn't get to feel like I was growing.

It was more like very subtly, very gradually, changing my physique in more micro ways. And I found myself during that time feeling sort of, you know, relative to how I like to feel. It was a frustrating experience, but ultimately it was a really positive one.

Well, then after that, since then, I've been in bulking programs on and off, taking little breaks, doing little tiny mini cuts, and then bulking again. This will be the first long, substantial cut that I'll be doing again. Not surprisingly, my coach sent me the date of my start.

It's like precisely as Mars is entering Cancer. I was like, okay, here we go again. But now I know what to expect. This is not going to be a fun, sexy period of my programming that is my favorite kind of experience. But it is good. It's a part of what this hobby is about.

There's periods where it's not as flashy and fun. That's, I know that's like such a mundane, stupid example. But the reason that I'm giving it is specifically because this talk came from recognizing in myself when I looked at that transit and the date of my new program, where I was like, "Oh, great! Here we go again.

I know exactly what I'm going to feel like, but now I'm ready because I went through it, and I know that it's just part of a process, and that's what life is, right? We go through these periods of time. It's not the end of the world. It's just part of a process.

Isn't it beautiful that these ancient traditions tell us life is eternal, and it's all a process, and you can trust it. You can deeply trust it with your heart. Helps me relax. I hope it helps you relax as well, and I hope you're able to get some good insights from this exercise today.

Have a beautiful day and weekend. We'll see you again next time. Bye.