CATHARSIS + CONSUMMATION: MARS IN CANCER
On March 25th, Mars leaves the sign of Gemini after six plus months of extended Mercurial madness. As a natal Mars in Gemini, I for one, am relieved. While not without its lessons, this transit was a reminder that Mars in Gemini is a purposeful agent of change but not a creator of sustenance.
In other words, we might have learned some things about what we cannot sustain, what punctures our capacity, what is adaptive but not necessarily nutritive. We changed and changed again. Perhaps each adaptation continued to lead us to what does not work. Or lead us to something that worked for a time, but not forever.
We tried on many a lens and are casting off with a new prescription, albeit without having fully had the capacity to take it all in. We are leaving, in the least, with a list of things we’ve survived, and some ideas about what we’d like to fight for.
Wars cannot be fought and won with words alone.
Wars need our sustenance, our energy, and our hard-won belief in something for which to fight.
Wars need medics, to tend wounds worked in battle, so we can continue to fight the good fight. And wars need our passion; our pure, unbridled and unrepressed feelings.
When Mars enters Cancer on the 25th, it lands immediately in debility in the sign of its fall. A debilitated planet has resources that are inappropriate to its general purpose. Mars in Cancer is not quite set up for Mars’y things. Mars destroys but Cancer, as the sign ruled by the Moon, is attuned to all the phases of growth. Luckily, Cancer understands that growth requires us to occasionally fall or cut back. Necessitates our respect for death. Commands us to confront our vulnerabilities, lest we expose too much.
What if a planet’s purpose is to cause chaos? To bring madness? To insue bloodlust?
Mars in Cancer is a warrior whelmed by its feels. Is a molting crab, walking into the fight for its own growth without a shell to protect it.
Just before Mars stationed retrograde, astrologer and translator Kristin Mathis’s wrote an essay on Mars in which she makes an argument for Ares/Mars as the god of trauma. This is exactly why Mars in Cancer is one of my favorite debilitated placements.
Cancer is a space of healing. Ruled by the Moon, it is a place of waxing and waning, birth, growth, decay and death. It is cyclical. It is compassionate. It has a hard shell and a soft interior. It is motherly. It is, traditionally, a home for children and folks who’ve fallen sick to grow and heal.
When Mars enters Cancer, trauma literally enters the realm of healing. This is not good for trauma. But it is very good for the overall health of the body.
It is also taxing. Healing takes energy.
And how apt for warrior Mars, after extended multi-tactical warfare in Gemini, to immediately enter a part of the zodiac where healing is pedestaled.
In my recent interview on Sagittarius Moon as a sect light with astrologer S.P. Hall, I talked about how in all the myths of the Moon, she never comes out unscathed. The Moon is wounded, struck, sliced, dismembered, cursed and so on. And somehow, the Moon always comes back to new and full.
Which brings me to catharsis.
Mars is penetrative. Applies pressure. Is insistent, strong and forceful in nature. But in Cancer, Mars’s tools turn emotional. Are the thrash of the waves and the pull of a tide. Are the purging of menses and the wild wrath of raging hormones. Are the reflective mirrors and pools which warp light and wrinkle the story.
In Cancer, Mars has the skill of drama. The ability to embellish. The talent for twisting and turning the thread in just the right way.
In Cancer, Mars is properly consumed.
Very often trauma is stuck. We play out the same vicious cycle over and over again and we go near-mad from the repetition of it.
In Cancer, Mars must fight with itself. But it can also access drama as a way to address the trauma. And in Cancer, Mars must learn to care with a breadth and depth that is required by injury.
Mars in Cancer is catharsis.
Catharsis is the combination of release and it’s follower - relief.
Catharsis pushes repressed feelings to release. Pulls the thorn from the skin, insisting the blood clot on its own.
Catharsis purifies. Liberates us by letting us actually feel the pain rather than denying, compartmentalizing, sucking it up as we go on.
Catharsis unbinds us from the trauma by forcing us to contact it. Catharsis moves the emotion through the body. Diffuses with dance, breath, role-play, lust, desire, ecstasy, anything that will push the feeling beyond the boundaries of its cage.
Catharsis delivers us, much like a babe from the womb. Much like Cancer and the Moon.
The first aspect Mars makes as it enters Cancer is a trine to Saturn in Pisces. Saturn is a god of irrigation. Think of a wound that is irrigated first before applying medicine and dressing it with clean fabric.
As Mars makes its way through the birth canal, let this be a time to purge and to cleanse. To turn to wounds that can’t heal without your participation. To target your injuries with salve. To wield the power of exaggeration with clear intention. To pull yourself into your own tide of pain and bring spirit with you, so that you awaken well-rested and warmed on sun-touched shore.
The only way out is through. Embrace vulnerability. Feel the fullness of the grief. And when relief returns, welcome it with the kind of reverence that only catharsis can confer.
If you want to talk about Mars in Cancer in your natal chart, my booking link for April will go out to my newsletter list next week on Wednesday, March 29th, 2023. My calendar will remain open for four days or until fully booked, whichever comes first.