cancer: star-bride, prism-body
the body in leisure, in love, in recovery
Letter #1 (the new moon — the conjunction):
My sisters,
I hope you will forgive me for leaving our celestial palace. I hope when you read this, you’ll sigh, exasperated, muttering of course I don’t have to ask for forgiveness because you understand how much girlhood matters to me, what I had to do to have it. Every now and then, I look at the moon and wonder what all of you are doing at home, if you miss me, what you would think of all the things I’ve found here. I want to share the earth with you.
I could not be the boy our parents wanted me to be. You always knew this. Here, I have a community that sees my body the way I’ve always seen it, the way it’s always been. No divinity or power means as much to me as the freedom and support to be myself.
These people accepted me as I am: as god, as girl. I’ve descended into a world rich with stories about other fleeing gods like me, so the village knows about my kind. They call me the star-bride, falling from the sky and changing the course of the human who finds them. Her new human body isn’t a disguise but another material expression of a varied spirit form too expansive to be so one-dimensional.
Star-bride, animal-bride, strange and lunar and Other and beloved. So many of their tales are about moon deities coming to the earth and finding a lover. Sometimes they stay and build a home here with them. Sometimes they take them back home as a reward for not being afraid of their power. When I heard the stories, I had to hold back tears. So many others like me, looking for someone who wouldn’t be afraid. So many found someone who loved them for their strangeness, not in spite of it. But so many others yet, held hostage in terrible situations because they were forced to hide their true selves to be safe.
They consider the moon a thing of great beauty on earth. Everyone loves my home more than I ever got the opportunity to. It only ever brought me misery.
They have given us so many moon-gods so many names and so many stories: Chandra, Artemis, Parvati, Luna, Tsukuyomi, I lose count. They tell me about the formation of the moon — the satellite that changed the topography of the earth, close enough to touch, and now they can’t imagine their land, their culture, their sense of self any other way. The moon lit up the night, pushed the tide, reshaped the plates with its pull; it changed the course of history by exposing a spy, by illuminating the lovers’ path to each other. It changed the earth’s orbit by choosing to stay, by entering into partnership with the earth. For these people, by bringing light to their dark, it changed their relationship to the sky and its stars, helped them see a sky long enough to weave stories from it.
When I listen to their stories, I wish all of you were here with me. I can imagine your interruptions frustrating the most patient storyteller, your questions, the way you would fix a tale by adding and subtracting even as it’s being spun.
I left because I wanted my reflection to be someone I recognized1. I don’t regret my decision and I don’t miss our parents. I hope you understand the joy this body has brought me, the unconditional love I receive in this village. Write back to me. I have met someone who understands how isolated I felt in my old body, someone who understands wanting to leave your past behind. Come meet her. You would love Zohal2.
Letter #90 (the first quarter — the waxing square):
My sisters,
I say this with immense love: all of you need to send all your queries together in one letter. The post-office is starting to gripe about having to trek to my house every day with new deliveries, especially when I’m away half the time in a communal bath with my friends.
This part of the letter is for Luna:
Tell me I’m your favorite sibling because I have the news you’re looking for. I’ve been meeting with the town mythologist and astrologer to study the star-bride myths that have enthralled all of us and she’s explaining Cancer to me because that was the one I was the most intrigued by (obviously). She explained the Thema Mundi; it’s this horoscope in Hellenistic astrology that describes the planetary positions when the universe was born. You will all be pleased to find out the universe is a Cancer rising (because She has good taste).
Cancer is the flooding of the river, the primordial water life begins in. It’s the birth of memory, the beginning of embodiment, a site of longing. Seeing Venus’ triplicity in Cancer, desire is the most human thing there is. And the desire is usually a desire for love, for the recipient of care to care back. We are the universe’s own longing for itself.
This part of the letter is for Punim:
Your observation about the star-bride is so astute (someone’s been doing their reading). Symbolically, she’s a perfect coupling of the natural with the supernatural (which is actually just the natural but spirit, where the beast is the natural but material). The beast and the god are the same: powerful, awe-inspiring, outside our rules and civilizations and cultures. The only difference is that one is subjugated and the other is worshipped.
In the shapeshifting star-bride god, we see the reconciliation of the god and the beast, especially when she has strikingly animal gifts. The elegant crane-wife takes off the animal skin as she comes home from her sky-palace to eat with her human family. She’s always partly savage — beast-like, unknowable and more beloved for it. Lest we forget, the moon has a dark side because there’s a part of her hidden in perpetuity. The divinity and the stripes never fade away but the god must be accepted entirely, in their half-tamed state. What is love if not an exercise in trusting someone to eventually knowable, cycles from now?
I always get secondhand stress when this part of the story comes up. I can’t imagine sneaking around like that, the toll it must take on your body to make such long journeys so quickly. And Punim, I know Zoon is reading this over your shoulder and scoffing at what she will call my wimpiness which it absolutely is not. It’s sensitivity. I am sharing the star-bride’s pain because I’m so compassionate and generous.
I know being children of the moon makes us all skilled at deceit but the rest of you must have inherited the penchant because I got none. Thank the moon Zohal already knows who I am; I can’t be married to a person I have to lie to 24/7. She’s too sharp to fool anyway.
The star-bride is a lunar figure in every sense; her deceit allows social relationships to work and teaches us that belonging is never as clean and easy as it seems. Just look at how she’s usually hiding her identity as a star-bride so she can stay. Because of her eternal Outsider status, she toils to belong: Psyche with Eros, the crane wife's dutiful work. Thrilled with acceptance, the bride gifts her spouse with knowledge, eternal life, etc., for trusting her. No one has challenged that mythic necessity yet or tried to accuse her of immoral behavior but if anyone does, I’m going all flared-cobra-hood on them because I feel fiercely protective of her.
I know what it’s like to lie to people to protect yourself from harm. All of us have something in us hidden in shadow from those we belong with. Love does not owe us clarity, especially when we haven’t made that clarity safe. She knows fear intimately but overcomes it, for love. Is there anything braver, more human?
The star-bride is so human in how she seeks fluidity, freedom, movement, exchange but also desires home, stability, sustenance. She’s courageous for not giving up either, even if the stories are too unkind to acknowledge it. Us lunar children understand how to reconcile fullness and scarcity, the waxing and waning, but I see the humans struggle with their mortality and wildness, desperate to tame it, afraid of their own bodies for changing. But familiarity doesn’t mean stagnation. We learned early how to reconcile contradictions, how to reconcile the ether with the earth, how to reconcile pleasure of the body with pleasure of the spirit. Our fearfulness and cowardice birth our softness, bravery, hopefulness. They just need a supportive community to shapeshift from one to another.
Like what you and Zohal have given me.
Letter #180 (the full moon — the opposition):
My sisters,
This is going to be an angrier letter than usual. Zohal and I made a trip to the neighboring village for supplies because I’m learning to make astrological talismans. I’m still upset at the disrespect I saw for the mortal form in their philosophies.
This part of the letter is for Qamar, who can’t wait to hear more about herself in the Cancer archetype because she loves praise:
Do you remember how you were always the most patient with us when we were children, because you understood how overwhelming maintaining a physical form was? Because you understood we hadn’t yet grasped our instincts and how they governed us? You saw how bewildering existing was and you let us discover the joy in it for ourselves, instead of pushing us to do it well, like it was a test. You just wanted us to love aliveness as it was, to love the sheer feeling of embodiment.
Like you, the moon maps time: immortal god changed into mortal star-bride/animal-bride time vs earth husband time, Saturnian time vs lunar time. Every month, the moon goes through the same short cycle. Time is the greatest force exerted upon the body so the moon rules the time experienced as embodiment, the time that alters our relationship to materiality so all of us feel the flow differently in our bodies.
Saturnian embodiment is crushing, teaching us how decay comes for all living things. Its cultivation is humbling, its growth exacting. With Saturn, the limits of the human body feel harrowing, like weaknesses to endure: illness, famine, pestilence, death. But lunar embodiment is the realization that the body is sacral precisely because of its limits. These limits orient us, give us direction, a place to begin from. Lunar growth is about choosing ease, choosing delight, refusing to believe that discipline must come from self-punishment. The body cannot be possessed or owned. It must be nurtured for how fleeting it is.
The moon's love for a place of beginning can be seen in how cardinal Cancer is her domicile. The moon's celebration of limits can be seen in her exaltation in fixed Taurus3. Her abundance and power flourish in precisely what our cultures encourage us to overcome, what they shame us for. Limits direct you and teach you how to focus your energy on what you want, what you can afford to do.
I did my research so I would come to a village that saw materiality the way I did: a delight, the chance to experience the world from another perspective, a relationship to existence to be cultivated slowly. I love this world so much, I can’t imagine a one-time mortal death. I want to keep coming back: as a snail, as a fern, as a rock, as a bird. I want to know every spirit in this plane, to befriend this world a thousand times over. I want to see and love Zohal as a snail, as a fern, as a rock, as a bird.
I know most people here wouldn’t understand a star-bride because their relationship to their bodies is filled with hate, so their caregiving is abusive4. They despise their own bodies for needing care because they see interdependence as a hurdle, a liability. They despise others’ bodies: sick bodies, alien bodies, mad bodies. They think their forms are vessels for consciousness, not the thing that fundamentally determines the nature and form of the fragmented awareness.
They're so precious about their bodies: hiding them, cursing them, dressing them up out of embarrassment, doing everything but letting them be. What a dream: to let this thing be. To watch it change more often, to watch it surprise you by losing an ability and then gaining a new one, to watch it finally reveal its wisdom.
I wish these humans knew they’re not weak but beloved of the moon for how they bumble, how they weep when they scrape a knee. I wish they knew all of you would love their fragile bodies, that I left everything behind to be like them. The moon adores these people for their mortality like only a god can love a human's fragility. Their solar cultures make them believe they should aspire to overcome their bodies because intelligence is superior when it’s separate from the form, untouched by illness and old age. Some of them in the neighboring village think everyone would be even better if we could just transcend the body. They rave about the dominion of mind over matter but the moon is the mind too: the bodymind. They dismiss the knowledge gleaned from pleasure and fun, preferring the purity of asceticism and worship because they think the body only proliferates lies, studying like boring farty monks instead of learning by being present in the world.
I wish I could shake them by the shoulders and make them realize all bodies have cycles of strength. It doesn’t make the human body flawed. The mountains and the sun and galaxies all have cycles too; these priests just won’t live long to see these things perish so they hold them as symbols of strength and permanence. I wish Zoon could whack them upside the head for me (she’d derive much more pleasure from it anyway).
Saturn is in detriment in Cancer; limits only feel antithetical to ideas of community when you think you can only enter into belonging when you have enough power to defend yourself against a surprise attack, when you suspect hidden enemies. Being human obviously feels like a curse when you want to be invincible. But that was never the point of getting to be human.
Cancer is a busy intersection where malefics come to suffer — Mars falls and Saturn is in detriment. The human body’s fragility should force these people to realize trying to get along when all of you suspect each other of betrayal or theft can never work. A community built on control is not a community; it’s a prison. Do you know why the moon falls in Scorpio? Because warring over resources tears communities apart. Putting objects and control before each other will kill us.
If scarcity, conflict over resources and violence make living hard, work together to abolish them. But these holy men just double down and call these things inevitable. They tell these people suffering will cleanse their sins, that poverty will get them into heaven. They refuse to take responsibility for how these things are deliberately manufactured by a few humans, saying that the gods ordained this, saying that mortality is a test to endure to be worth the afterlife. They build their dictatorships and call it a collective of care, insisting that one leader can change everything alone.
How do I tell them mortality is all they have? How do I tell them this world they’re trying to escape is all they have, that they can’t leave their children in it to suffer and flee to the hypothetical afterlife themselves? Zohal held me as I wept when we returned from the market, held me when I wanted to launch myself at the priests telling their lies in the center.
In Cancer, you learn how to ask for help; you’re supposed to be limited by each other precisely so you won’t become individual tyrants. You're Nemo's dad, begging the fish to swim together against the net (Zohal showed me the movie when I was pacing around the room in my frustration; when you visit, we’ll watch it together). The moon waxes and wanes over the month, fasting and feasting. It loses and gains strength. That's why safety and community are so important to the moon. It knows it'll lose strength eventually and will require protection. I love the humans who understand this and rejoice in this, who don’t see death as a terror but as a way to return as something else, to love the world from a new body.
My sisters, you and I, we're perfect. But imperfection is what makes this earth beautiful. The human body, the environment that fails to grow the crops sometimes, the river that floods the banks, the language that can't hold thought and bursts at the seams as I try to talk to you — these are all faulty because they break. But it's because these things are in halves that change is possible; there is a dark side that can come to light, emptiness where something new can grow. Breaking is a form of change5. It propels them endlessly forward.
When Zohal and I built a home, we built it next to the river so we could watch the water. It always moves towards the place where it isn't, seeking emptiness to fill, seeking deprivation to nurture into abundance. I am wet sand. I am the Star-bride falling. I am the tread of her sole in the sand, the print of Zohal’s hand changing the lines in mine because I held it so long. I held it until the end of time. Cancer as tenderness, Cancer as softness, Cancer as a gaze melting with love. Cancer as a young world and a younger universe only trying to understand itself.
These people are driven towards something because the borders of their world are porous. They can cross them into new land. Imperfection is everything yet to be and they're singing it into their world. Perfection is completeness; there's no room in it for imagination. It's stasis. These people are in perpetual flow6.
When you are always in movement, you should have a community that reminds you to use your body for leisure, to lounge, to indulge. Your body shouldn’t be just a site of communal labor but also communal pleasure. You should be encouraged by well-wishers to take a break, forced by friends to enjoy your life. I wanted to shake the priests by their shoulders and scream at them: endurance is not a skill! Sacrifice is not an accomplishment! Suffering is not greatness! Stop lying to these people to hide your loot! Stop telling them that survival is only this terrible exacting thing and never joyous, never worth it, except to go to a heaven that sounds mysteriously exactly like the earth!
When your own god’s idea of beauty is this planet, how can you forsake it like this? How can you push people to abandon it like this, to hate it so deeply, to blame it for all their misery?
I would have started a fight in the marketplace if Zohal hadn’t steered me away and bought me ice-cream so I’d calm down. I can just imagine Zoon squealing with laughter at reading this but for the record, I was hyperventilating with rage.
Letter #270 (the third quarter — the waning square):
My sister Zoon,
You visited when I was having the staggering realization that I lost most of my childhood to our parents’ demands that I live as their son. The loss was so enormous once I finally looked at it in the face that I wept about it for a month, grieving my due. Zohal knew how it felt because they had been through it too so she offered to help me build it anew. You visited when we were compiling our cartoons list to catch me up so we watched Sailor Moon together.
If time exists everywhere in every direction all at once, can my childhood not too? Can I not reach back and pull my child self into my current state, show her everything she will get to have some day?
The moon is in detriment in Capricorn, where it is lonely, cold and abandoned, where it is aggrieved from betrayal7. Zohal and the other villagers brought me back into shared warmth, assured me of being loved, of belonging. They understand my needs as natural, not uncontrollable and strange.
As our parents berated me for my femininity, they admonished you for your masculinity. You and I were both ostracized. You buried it; I wore it on my sleeve. It cut me so deeply to be belittled. I wonder if your wound still aches too. Have you ever thought about living a different way, where care didn’t come with a cost attached, where you didn’t have to give up your sense of self to get it?
Both of us coped with our hardship by wishing we could grow up and run away. We sacrificed our childhoods to be free of our parents’ tyranny. Do you ever think about that loss?
If you want to leave home, I have a room where you can stay.
book with me at @ranniazorya or by emailing me at ranniazorya@gmail.com. I offer basic birth chart overviews (you can choose the question), profection year consultations, 3-month transit breakdowns (based on your chart) and tarot readings.
Mulan — extended version of Reflection with missing artwork
Arabic for Saturn
The philosophical disrespect for limits and the veneration of solar intelligence is inspired by this discussion by thestrologyshow on Earth signs.
“That friend was right: all of us were eager to offer care; receiving care, not so much. It was so much easier to offer care to other people than to ask for what we needed, for so many reasons. Many of us had been raised as immigrants and/or women or femmes of color to always jump up and feed people first, do all the dishes, and help without being asked, while serving ourselves last. For many of us, care had been something that was forced on us—something abusive family members or teachers or health care workers did, whether we liked it or not. Or care had been something it wasn’t safe to say that we needed—because there was no care out there for us, no health care, no therapist, no parent with time, no safe parent who actually cared. Maybe as disabled people, if we wanted to have any kind of independence, we had to deny that we needed any help at all—in order to stay in mainstreamed classes, go to college, or date, we had to say that we didn’t have any needs. I can remember my mother clearly telling me in high school, when I first thought I might be neurodivergent—it was decades before I would know that word, but I was still really fucking clear that my brain and cognition and my ability to navigate space were very different from most people around me—that it was unsafe for me to say that I might need a tutor—tutors and accommodations, newly allowed under the brand new ADA, were for the rich white boys; I just had to be twice as smart and keep up if I wanted to get a scholarship. I couldn’t afford to look “stupid.” — pg. 26 of Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.
42nd episode of Sailor Moon R: The Final Battle Between Light and Dark: Pledge of Love for the Future (to explain Capricorn moons
and something from Anne With An E, s3, ep5, I Am Fearless and Therefore Powerful:
"Goddess of Beltane, Sacred Mother, Queen of May, Wild Lady of the Woods, Guardian of Love and Life, welcome to our circle.
We women, powerful and sacred, declare upon this Hallowed Night, our heavenly bodies belong solely to us.
We shall choose whom to love, and with whom to share trust.
We shall walk upon this earth with grace and respect.
We'll always take pride in our great intellect.
We'll honor our emotions so our spirits may soar!
And should any man belittle us, we'll show him the door!
Our spirits are unbreakable, our imaginations free!
Walk with us, Goddess, so blessed are we!"
I write Mahsa as a tribute to the marginalized forms of femininity: the trans girl, the mother of ballroom culture, the bisexual girl. When we think about care and compassion, who is the figure doling it out? Is it a respectable white woman at a PTA meeting? Or is it a panhandler near a bus-stop, trying to feed her friends?
the music:
Otome No Policy (Japanese and English subtitles) (Sailor Moon closing theme)
Moonlight Densetsu extended (Japanese and English subtitles) (Sailor Moon opening theme)
Heart Moving (Japanese and English subtitles) (Sailor Moon closing theme)
Your name (Kimi no Na wa) (2016) has an opening that I think will feel familiar to Cancer children because it speaks of that lingering feeling after dreaming that you’re recalling a past life, that you’re always searching, that you’re always missing something. Sleep is disorienting because you always come so close to the answer but never close enough and then you’re falling out of the sky back into your body, forgetting its language all over again, a name dying on your lips as you gasp awake. The only thing that remains is the longing. The last thing you see is a comet-trail lighting up the night of your dream, the familiar voice calling your name.
as always: the moonlight is a messenger of love ♥ ♡
your work is just.. chef’s kiss 🤌🏻