The Spring House: Approaching Solstice
As the light stretches toward its peak and the days grow long, we arrive at the cusp of Summer: a place both radiant and hidden. Solstice is not only a celebration of the sun’s ascendancy, but also a pause. Solstice is a moment lasting three days. The Sun stands still and time seems to shimmer. Beneath this golden moment, lies water.
This is the season of Cancer: cardinal water, the beginning of water, source, holy well, great mother. Sacred springs rising from the earth. Cancer-time takes us each back to our source.
My early childhood, in the 1960’s, was spent in rural New Brunswick. My parents were artists and academics. Their mid-20th Century bohemian lifestyle played out against the backdrop of 19th century amenities. The old farmhouse rattled in the winter winds, the wood-burning cookstove was the centre of family life. We had indoor plumbing, just (there was an actual pump at the kitchen sink) but many of our neighbours (artists, draft-dodging hippies, and traditional farming families) did not.
A little bit further down our raggedy iron-red dust-dirt road bordering the Bay of Fundy, lived a young couple, in an old clapboard farmhouse like ours, but without the plumbing. The young homesteading woman was someone who my five-year-old self idolized. With her soft voice and shimmering long hair, her quiet poetry, her way of addressing me as an intelligent and thoughtful fellow human, she earned my devotion and affection.
And she gave me the gift of one of my most beautiful, vivid, and powerful child-memories.
This is a stand-alone image, like a dream image. There’s no context. Just she and I, walking through tall summer grass towards a small lichen-grey out-building, the spring-house. She opens the grey door to the shadowed interior. At the threshold a huge flagstone slopes down into dark water which burbles up over it. The dry hayfield sun-smell of our walk is overpowered by a clean wet mineral smell so beautiful I can still feel it in the cavities of my forehead, lifting and opening my senses even now fifty years on from that moment.
Well-springs are sacred. There’s no why to this. Visit an old, wild or barely-tamed spring, anywhere in the world (though they are rare now) and you will feel that mineral truth in the bony cavities of your skull. Springs are sacred. The beginning of water. Source, holy well, great mother.
Today I want to speak about Cancer not as a sign, but as a landscape, as a sacred country you carry inside you. Cancer is cardinal water: a beginning, a wellspring. She is the first emergence of feeling, the rush of milk, the voice that says come home.
Before the Zodiac began with Aries, before the hero's cry of I am, ancient astrologers placed the cosmic beginning in Cancer. In the Thema Mundi, the symbolic natal chart of the cosmos, the Ascendant is not Aries, but Cancer. The sacred rising of the fertile floodwaters, the gush of amniotic fluids signaling birth, the coming of nourishing rains, the heliacal rising of the water-bearing stars. Water is life.
In the familiar myth of Hercules slaying the Hydra, Cancer the Crab appears only briefly, a minor character, crushed beneath the hero’s heel. But this footnote contains a fragment of something far older and sadly, more enduring: a story of conquest, erasure, and sacred water.
The Hydra, slain by Hercules as part of his second labor, is said to have lived in the marshes of Lerna, south of Argos on an inlet of the Aegean Sea. In antiquity, Lerna was known for its springs and labyrinthine wetlands. It was a site of fertile fresh waters, abundant resources, ritual significance, and mythological resonance. Known to hold a rare entrance to the Underworld, it was a sanctuary of water, a place where rites of rebirth and descent may have been enacted. Its sacredness, like that of many ancient wetlands, lay in its fertile liminality, its waters rising from unseen places.
The myth of Hercules slaying the many-headed water-serpent Hydra may encode ancestral memories of conquest. There is archaeological evidence suggesting that Lerna’s wetlands, with her many headwaters, were deliberately filled in during periods of invasion or political upheaval. It’s not difficult to imagine that the tale of Hercules slaying the Hydra, a many-headed, chthonic, serpentine figure linked to water mysteries, reflects an historical effort to suppress older cult practices and assert a new order, one aligned with conquest, rationality, and control.
The crab’s role in the story is small, but telling. She emerges from the margins, defending the Hydra with a pinch to the heel, a gesture of loyalty to the watery source. For this, she is crushed. And yet, the goddess Juno (herself a later echo of more ancient goddesses) rewards the crab by placing her in the sky.
This fragment of myth reveals the larger pattern we’ve traced across so many stories: stories of displacement from nourishing ancient homelands, the sanctuaries of feeling and memory replaced by structures of dominance. The wetlands are filled in. The springs are stopped up, ancient headwaters dry to a trickle. Many are living this story now.
So Cancer, then, is not merely the keeper of home and hearth. She is the protector of waters, of the hidden spring, the source that continues to flow, even when forgotten. In the natal chart, she marks the place where you may have armoured yourself against feeling, but also where you still long to return to re/source yourself. The house Cancer rules, and the planets it contains, point toward our inner wellsprings: the places we seek nourishment, the temples we may have built over living waters, and the quiet instinct that still knows how to find the pure source and draw from it. To walk into Cancer Season is to walk toward that inner wellspring.
Seeking the sacred source of Cancerian waters within can bring you closer to your own instincts and truth. Understanding the importance of our symbolic waters within and also our actual earthly waterways and pure sources of water may help with the terrible but necessary work of acknowledging the enormity of environmental and human losses in these times. And to having the courage to contribute to 11th hour resistance and healing work. Cancer is after all, also the sign of the people, and the human family as a whole.
Cancer season is the time to go inward listen, begin again, not with fire, but with water.
May this Solstice bring you closer to that sacred, hidden place.
May you be nourished.
Journaling Prompt for Cancer Season: I find my source and well-spring in…
Suggested Reading for Cancer Season: Robert MacFarlane, Is a River Alive? and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead