Skip to content
Bodhastra
Your birth date

Date-only systems resolve immediately. Systems that require a birth time or place will say so instead of guessing.

Traditions to include

Choose one or several. With no choices, general browsing shows every tradition.

Your date and choices are saved only in this browser on this device. Clear all removes them.

The twelve sun signs, from Babylonian star lists through Ptolemy to the newspaper horoscope.

Western · sign 4 of 12 · natural 4th house

Cancer

21 June – 22 July, 2025

1 claim about Cancer can be traced to antiquity and are still made today. Everything else on this page arrived later, and each entry says when.

When Cancer actually begins

ingress 202521 June 2025, 02:42 UTC
ends22 July 2025, 13:29 UTC
boundary drift 1925–202520 June – 22 June (37.5 h)

Computed from the Sun’s true ecliptic longitude for this year, not read from a fixed table. If you were born within a day of either boundary, a site using a table may put you in a different sign — and it is the table that is wrong.

What survives from antiquity

These are the only claims on this page that may honestly be introduced with “tradition holds”. Each is attested by an ancient or early-modern source and by a contemporary one.

What arrived with the popularisers

Claims that reach us through Alan Leo, Raphael and Sepharial — the Edwardian writers who turned astrology into a mass-market genre — with no ancient source behind them. These are usually the most familiar things said about Cancer, and the page reference for each is below it.

What the tradition said and we stopped saying

Attested in antiquity, and repeated by no contemporary source in this corpus.

The fate the classical texts predicted

Firmicus Maternus and his contemporaries did not write character sketches. They predicted outcomes, and this is what they predicted for Cancer. Every one of these has been dropped — across the whole corpus, no modern source repeats a single one.

  • ruin and captivityJulius Firmicus Maternus, Mathesis VIII.22.2
  • a violent deathJulius Firmicus Maternus, Mathesis VIII.22.2

The work

Occupations are the one part of this tradition that demonstrably reaches the present. Character claims mostly do not, and physiognomy does not at all — but the trades the classical texts assigned to Cancer are still being assigned to it.

Rulership

The classical scheme gave every sign one of the seven visible planets. The outer planets were discovered between 1781 and 1930 and reassigned later, so where a sign has two rulers, both are real claims from different centuries. Neither is the correction of the other.

traditional

Moon

attested antiquity → present7 of 12 core sources

modern

none assigned

No outer planet was ever assigned to this sign. That is the answer, not a gap in the data.

Correspondences

Grouped by what kind of claim each is. Element and modality are agreed by every source in every century; the lucky numbers are agreed by almost nobody. Both appear on every astrology site in the same table, in the same type, which is how one borrows the other’s authority.

structural

Agreed by every source in every century.

element
  • water
attested antiquity → present5 of 12 core sources
modality
  • cardinal
attested antiquity → present5 of 12 core sources
polarity
  • feminine
attested antiquity → present7 of 12 core sources
sect
  • nocturnal
17th c. only · no modern source1 of 12 core sources

dignity

Classical doctrine. Stable, but the outer planets are a modern addition.

exaltation
  • Jupiter traditional
attested antiquity → present3 of 12 core sources
fall
  • Mars traditional
attested antiquity → present2 of 12 core sources
detriment
  • Saturn traditional
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources

mythic

The sign's image. Phrasings vary; the figure does not.

symbol
  • The Crab
modern only · no pre-1929 source3 of 12 core sources
guardian deity
  • Mercury
antiquity only · no modern source1 of 12 core sources

body

Melothesia — the sign's part of the body. Ancient, and not medical.

body part
  • Breast
  • breast
  • chest
  • stomach
attested antiquity → present1 of 12 core sources

accretion

Modern accretion. Sources rarely agree with each other.

stone
  • Pearl
  • Ruby
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
colour
  • pale blue
  • sea-green
  • Silver-grey
  • White
modern only · no pre-1929 source2 supporting sources · none in the core panel
flower
  • Orchid
  • white rose
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
day
  • Monday

contested Thursday — one source disagrees.

modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
number
  • 15
  • 2
  • 20
  • 3
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
tarot card
  • The Chariot
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 supporting source · none in the core panel
ruled countries
  • Algeria (Skyscript)
  • also Scotland
  • Amsterdam
  • Carthage (Ptolemy) = Tunisia
  • Holland
  • Milan
  • Numidia
  • Venice
  • York
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 supporting source · none in the core panel

The body the old books describe

William Lilly, Raphael and Sepharial all told you what a Cancer looked like. Modern astrology dropped this entirely: across the whole corpus, not one physical description is repeated by a contemporary source. It is reproduced here as what those writers said, in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and for no other reason.

stature
short 3middle 1
build
stout 2small 1
hair colour
brown 2sandy 2
eye colour
blue 2grey 2
eyes
defective 1large 1
complexion
pale 4
face shape
round 4full 1
head
swollen 1
forehead
broad 1
nose
short 1
chin
double 1
chest
broad 1
hands
short 1
features
small 1
constitution
weak 2
previous Geminiopposite Capricornnext Leo

Bodhastra documents what astrological traditions have said, and when they started saying it. It is presented as cultural history and entertainment. Nothing here is medical, psychological, financial or predictive advice, and nothing here is a claim about what will happen to you.

Every source, listed

Place data from GeoNames, used under CC BY 4.0.