Beyond Relationship
The importance of Cancer and Leo for the manifest universe extends beyond intimate relationships. Relationships mythically relate to the Oriental Taoist philosophy of Yin Yang polar opposites, a philosophy that describes the masculine and feminine interaction of all of life and qualities, not just relationship. Your relationship is the basis of family. Your family is the basis of community. Within community, interaction is based on the needs of the community as well as on the feelings of extended family and friends that living in a group provides. The manifest ways that we interact and network are extensions of the Cancer Leo dance of creation. Looking at some of these areas, we can gain valuable insight into how our communities work, and how they can be changed as we evolve as a species into the coming New Age.
Community
Community is ruled by Cancer, not Leo. This includes the larger community of state and nation. It is a feminine area of focus and activity. For the last 4000 years men have taken control of community, and pushed women back into the isolation of their homes. And even then, men often claim ownership of the house and home by patriarchal custom. The community center is where men transact business, engage in power politics, and rule the rest of the community with a competitive warrior mentality. Women are relegated to the home, where they are supposed to take care of children, and cook food for her man. Taking community away from women isolated them and made them easier to control. Yet the community is not the natural arena of men. Is it any wonder that our cities have become centers of internal violence and dissent as the masculine qualities of fighting and individual ego surface in a clash of cultures and income levels? Or that the only way to insure community peace is often through the use of overwhelming police or military force?
The community belongs to the Cancer feminine, and needs to be returned to her if we are to reinvigorate our communities and nations with positive creative power. It was the feminine that invented agriculture and the first settled villages during the Age of Cancer. It was the feminine that enlarged on the village creating our first cities and civilizations during the feminine Age of Taurus. It was the masculine that turned civilization into armed empires in the following masculine Age of Aries. The masculine control of cities and communities fosters argumentative dissent, standing up for individual rights, and armed rebellion. The Leo mentality pushes us in this direction. Feminine control of our cities and communities can foster an enhanced sense of nurturing, bringing a comfortable feeling of extended family back into our communal lives.
A woman in her community has the natural ability to network on many different levels, touching the nerve center of community needs and wants. She will be able to marshal a greater percentage of people to help out where needed. She feels life, and the emotional tone of those around her.
We are long past reverting to a matriarchal social and political system with women in charge. With the Age of Aquarius coming, we are approaching a new type of system that might well be called an equiarchy, or rulership and government based on equality, or by both genders in an archetypal balance. There are no easy answers on how to do this, as there is a long established system in place that is characterized by social, mental and emotional inertia. Regardless of how this happens, we do need to make our communities more women and family friendly.
Business and the Economy
Business and the economy reflect masculine and feminine values in different ways, depending on the economic system in question. Capitalism is a masculine approach to economics, carrying with it masculine qualities of competition, dominance, empire building, and individual rewards. Socialism, the other major economic system that we are familiar with, reflects a feminine approach that concerns itself with nurturing and concern for everyone in the communal family. It is more egalitarian, and less competitive.
Business began in early village life if not before. The Age of Cancer, between 8640 and 6480 BCE, settled humanity down into permanent villages and pushed them to invent agriculture and animal husbandry. This age was highly feminine, with the Cancer energies of the times adding to and supporting the Cancer feminine gender. The making of shoes and clothing, and other articles required for village life, was done by hand. In any community, some people were more adept at making a particular article than others were, and we can assume that a system of very simple bartering of articles came into being that likely helped with the nurturing life of the community.
This developed into a more complex bartering system during the Age of Gemini from 6480 to 4320 BCE. Gemini rules trade and barter. Huge trade networks spread across the Near East from the Mediterranean to southern Russia by 5000 BCE. A similar trade network in the Americas at this same time spread from the Yellowstone to the New England area, south to the Gulf. Crafts industries were everywhere, manned by part-time crafts people still tied to the soil and the work of growing food. There are no signs of social hierarchy during this age.
It wasn’t until the Age of Taurus, 4320 to 2160 BCE, that money and banking was invented and bartering changed to a business platform. Villages changed into market towns after 4000 BCE, and wealth became the focus of community. Civilized cities quickly grew out of these increasingly wealthy villages. Banks were invented and loans were floated to finance large projects. This time was still within the matriarchy, and the economic system that evolved from this was a socialistic system that served to make sure that every person within the city-state or nation-state was taken care of.
Wealth coming into a community was collected in temple warehouses and distributed to the populace from there. Social hierarchies were created within these new cities giving everyone a secure place within civilization. While everyone had their place, everyone was also taken care of according to their status. The Pharaoh in Egypt was seen as the chief administrator of Egypt’s wealth, head of the sacred temple and the warehouses that collected the wealth as an essential part of the temple. Wealth was the foundation of religion and spiritual attainment. Taurus rules wealth, money, and banking.
Capitalism is a masculine system based on individual profit, warrior like competition, the creation of business empires, and the eventual rise of corporations that exist outside the concerns of country and community. Money, and money alone, is the god of capitalism. Unfortunately, the capitalistic drive for profit has taken us today to the brink of extinction. It has stripped us of the communal feminine notion that the resources of Mother Nature, as a living embodiment of the Divine Mother, are to be protected. Instead, the capitalist sees these resources as mere inanimate metals, wood, and other elements to be taken at the will of the Leo warrior captain of industry.
As a result the earth is under severe stress, the environment is deteriorating at a rapid rate, and climate change has become a devastating curse that promises to seriously impact humanity. Our blind adherence to capitalism promises to destroy the environment, an action that will negatively impact community, from nations around the world, down to local communities. As our communities contract because of this environmental stress, our relationships will also suffer.
Our capitalist fear of socialism is at bottom a residual masculine fear of the feminine. Capitalists associate socialism with dictatorship, and a socialistic ideological rule of a weak feminine over the strong masculine. It associates feminine nurturing with laziness and abuse, and a communal vision with the loss of patriarchal individual freedoms. Today, we need a new economic vision that combines capitalistic inventiveness with socialistic concerns for community and people.
Politics
Our chosen political systems also reveal masculine and feminine sensibilities. It is easy to see that monarchies and dictatorships reflect the masculine warrior ideal. The Leo quality of kingship shines brightly through these types of governments where one man rules with an iron fist from the top.
The older matriarchy ruled quite effectively, but from a different direction. While Leo rules kingship, Cancer rules the community. Cancer is the political body, the populace that is either ruled or rules itself. The sign Capricorn sits 180 degrees across the wheel from Cancer and from this position adds an equal amount of polar energy to the expression of Cancer. Capricorn is also a feminine sign, like Cancer, and it specifically rules government, what we could say is the governing aspect of the larger Cancer community. Capricorn rules the efficient use of natural resources, including the various talents of everyone in the community. Capricorn directs everyone’s focus into the betterment of the community, and enhances civic pride.
Democracy is the most archetypal feminine political system that we have today. It supports the expression of masculine individual talents and expertise through the feminine Cancer nurturing ideal of personal freedoms. These individual talents then become resources for the community as a whole. The President, and those in Congress on the national level, sit in motherly nurturing service to the people, in a somewhat Cancer parental position of guidance expressed in response to the desires and needs of the voting public.
Because we live in a patriarchal world, even within a democracy, the masculine ideal of the male warrior politician or businessman creating personal empires is still overwhelming. Business and corporate interests constantly strive to subvert the desires of the people through lobbying and bribes to our members of Congress. The challenge today is the attempt by corporate interests to subvert democracy to an even more masculine capitalistic set of business and corporate empires that can dictate their desires to government with impunity.
War
In our patriarchal world, war is honored as a spiritual path of sorts. In spite of the prevalence of PTSD men still see war as a glorious endeavor. Soldiers and military leaders actively collect ribbons that show to others how many conflicts that they have fought in, and which ones. And we love our violent action movies.
With the change to patriarchy after 2500 BCE, war entered the political and religious consciousness of humanity in a big way. The Age of Aries, 2160 to 0 BCE, brought with it war, an Aries activity, out of the peacefulness of the previous Age of Taurus. Because Aries rules war, war and combat naturally entered the religious sphere. Hero mythologies were created that elevated the warrior’s path to heaven. War became glorious, and heroes such as the Greek Hercules and the Judeo-Christian Samson were revered in these new religions. A hero could expect songs to be written about his exploits against monsters as well as enemies. He could be remembered for all eternity.
The Judeo-Christian Old Testament is in large part a war document chronicling the exploits of a warrior god leading his army of Chosen People in conquest of a land already occupied by a people who would become the required Aries enemy for his army. Spilt blood sanctified this Promised Land in an Aries manner. In this same way Moses freed the Israelites from the Taurus Age oppression of the Pharaoh, Samson tore down the Taurean megalithic temple of the Philistines, David slew the Taurus giant Goliath, and the prophet Elijah killed the Canaanite priests with his bare hands. All of this was to mythically attest to the “glory” of God, a masculine warrior ideal.
War may have evolved in part from an older matriarchal view that menstrual blood was all powerful. Women bled and did not die. They gave birth to new life through their vaginas, the ever present wound, and they provided men with immense spiritual pleasure from this well at the end of the world, their sacred grove of Diana, the Moon Goddess. When men took control of the halls of power, they needed to show that they too could bleed as a woman did in order to inherit the power of women.
Rites of passage were instituted, or elevated in status or altered from an older ritual, to provide boys at puberty with their own blood passage into manhood. In many cultures this was achieved by going out into the wilderness to confront one’s own mortality, to kill a lion, find a spirit guide, or some other form of blood transformation. If they could not make it, they died, they lost their blood. A few cultures performed a rite called subcision, where they cut the underside of their penis to bleed from a vagina-like wound much as a woman does. At various times in their adult life they would re-consecrate their lives by undergoing the ritual again.
Our rite of circumcision is similar to this. The foreskin of the male penis is cut off, traditionally at puberty in other Semitic tribes at that time. Young men would bleed from their genitals as women do. This has been altered in Jewish culture to seven days after birth, and a mental rite-of-passage was put in place called the bar mitzvah for boys and bat mitzvah for girls. The penis bleeds like a woman, from the genitals, and the boy gains access to feminine power because of this.
Bleeding from wounds became spiritually important for men, and as a result we invested great mythic power into the bloody act of warfare. Male weapons were the phallic sword and spear. They opened vaginal wounds in the bodies of our enemies. If we survived battle, and our wounds, we gained power and acclaim. We carried circular shields as symbolic of the protective feminine in order to make sure that our wounds would not be fatal. Because of this, war became a very spiritual practice, and glory was our reward.
The answer to this is to no longer propagate the glories of war anymore, but to redefine the spiritual path for men in a new masculine paradigm of lover. The blood that we need to shed is the blood of our own emotional attachments to love and relationship. We no longer need to bleed the same way that a woman bleeds to find glory. We do not need to try to take a woman’s natural power from her for our own selfish ends. We can tap into a woman’s power through our relationships, and use her power for our combined ends.
The Environment
There is a very real reason that the environment and the earth are referred to as Mother Nature. There is a deep and intimate archetypal connection between women and the earth. Cancer is a water sign that rules the land, the earth. She is the archetypal mud that Turtle Island was created from. She rules the boundaries that outline different ecological zones as well as nations, continents, and the earth herself. Her boundaries also include emotional boundaries, how we use her resources, and showing the proper respect for her in our interactions with nature.
The environmental scientist James Lovelock calls her Gaia because she exhibits elements of awareness. She is a biosphere that has the ability to self-regulate and keep the planet healthy by controlling the chemical and physical properties of the planet. In essence, she is alive.
Native cultures traditionally see themselves as stewards of the earth. They ask permission of Mother Earth to take and use resources, and only what they need for any particular purpose or event. Relationships naturally tap into that same connection with Mother Earth.
In a multi-dimensional universe, the conscious awareness of love and wisdom flows through each and every one of us. It also flows through the molecules that comprise trees and rocks, the mountains and valleys, the streams and oceans that create our environment. It flows through the very earth herself and intimately connects us to her as children to a great and giving mother. This means that absolutely everything is alive with love. As we dig resources out of her body, oil, coal and natural gas, we scar not only the earth. These scars have to hurt us as well, creating abscesses within our relationships.
The religious masculine domination of relationships affects our approach to the environment as well, leading us to the brink of extinction with massive ecological destruction of our world, including apocalyptic climate change. The Biblical passage that tells us to go forth and subdue the earth has been interpreted as meaning that we can take what we want, subduing the earth in a violent warrior manner. I would say that originally there was a different meaning in this passage. We are to go forth and subdue the wildness of earth with love and compassion. This will do more to transform our world and take us to the next level of existence in a universe filled with love and prosperity.
In reverse, emotional biofeedback, can a new approach to relationships heal our environment? As we heal our connections between men and women, it is only logical that we begin to see the environment in a new and healthier way. The earth, being alive, would then respond, crying for joy at our rediscovered love for her and for each other. As we expand our hearts, a heart field of loving energy radiates out from us, extending for miles. The earth is bathed in the energy of our love, and responds by settling back into a more harmonious stability in support of her children. This includes a change in our corporate relationship to the earth and her natural resources, and our fascination with the destructiveness of war.
Relationship as the vehicle for creation requires a loving and balanced equality of energies where masculine and feminine feed and nurture each other. From this, relationship becomes a powerful new form of meditation and spiritual practice that can promote miracles in our lives and give us direction for action in the external world that can lead to the creation of a healthy utopian world. A balanced and loving relationship creates a powerful family life. Balanced and loving families create a more balanced and loving community, economy, and environment. And this will create a more balanced and loving spirituality.
The feminine has been beaten down and imprisoned for far too long. It is past time for her to re-emerge and guide us through the times ahead. As she comes back to us, it cannot be as female men, but as women with their own sensibilities and powers. Everything promises to change, but this change promises to be for the better. Welcome home.
