Water Everywhere – Mars Enters Cancer

By Len Wallick

Mars enters the cardinal water sign Cancer early on Wednesday morning. The Moon, Cancer’s ruler, enters Libra less than an hour later and squares Mars within two minutes. Promptly thereafter, the Red Planet forms a water trine with Neptune, which is retrograde in Pisces. That’s lot of activity packed into a short time. It is especially auspicious as a beginning. If beginnings mean anything, we can expect water, in all of its representations, to be an assertive presence in our lives over the next seven weeks or so.  

Astrologers disagree on whether the the martian archetype, as expressed in your life, is bad news or good. There appears to be a consensus, however, that Mars is associated with the vigorously assertive. According to astrologer Robert Hand, Mars functions to “energize” and “incorporate” the characteristics of any sign or house it occupies as well as any planet it aspects. The elementary astrological characteristic that Cancer, Pisces, Neptune and the Moon have in common is water. 

Clearly, water means the stuff that makes up most of your body and covers most of Earth’s surface. It’s an amazing substance. As a gas, its expansion can’t be confined. As a liquid, it cannot be compressed. As a solid, it can overcome the hardest rock yet form lacy crystals that float through the air. It’s essential to life as we know it, but also a formidable potential threat to human life. The list of unique properties attributable to the tangible, familiar substance goes on and on. Yet, astrology takes water even further, into the symbolic.

Thousands of years ago, people got the bold idea that nature and the cosmos were sensible. Systems of thought were developed to further understanding. Astrology was a respectable and respected part of that effort. One organizing principle common to many of those systems of thought was the concept that the material world was made of four elements; earth, air, fire and water.

Astrology incorporated those four elements as a part of its own system of signs. Apropos of the material substance, water signs were associated with emotions. Language itself makes the equivalency, variously describing feelings as steamy, icy, flowing or coming in waves. Similarly, the mind, like the sky, can be clouded or cleared as the symbolic water accumulates or precipitates. The intuitive (seeing below the surface) and universal (solvency and need for) are among the other qualities of water that bring metaphor to be consistent with the tangible.

Now, just as actual streams and rivers will flow together to bring power to a place, representations of the ancient elemental liquid will come together in time. It is as if to emphasize the power of the moment when the archetype of Mars will enter the headwaters of astrology, both energizing and incorporating at the source.

The brief cardinal square to the Moon initiates a pattern that will repeat over weeks to come as personal circumstances and political events compel us to actively honor our feelings while also opening our hearts. The longer trine to Neptune, co-ruler of Pisces, named after the mythic monarch of the seas, anticipates a convergence further downstream which is being written in the beginning.

That beginning comes on Wednesday and it’s high time to begin paying attention to all that is wet. If we can do that we will be better prepared to navigate through what promises to be a period of energetic encounters with a powerfully assertive force both within and without.

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