The library · The other points and bodies

Juno in Cancer

the asteroid Juno in tropical Cancer

What the tradition reads

Juno's astrological reading is a modern one, entering practice in the 1970s with the first asteroid ephemeris, and is offered here as a recent delineation rather than as inherited doctrine. Cafe Astrology reads the sign Juno occupies as the area where a person wants to do well and wants matters even, where unfair treatment is felt keenly, and where insecurity can become manoeuvring. In Cancer, the site's delineation names emotions, family, the capacity to care and nurture, the sense of safety and old attachments as the soft places. When such natives feel threatened, the reading holds, they do whatever restores comfort and safety, and can be self protective to an extreme. It adds that they would rather others did not see how vulnerable they are, and may resort to indirect means to get their way, forgetting, in the source's words, that being aboveboard does not diminish security in the long run. Set beside Juno's general themes of commitment and fair exchange, this is read as a placement where the need in a bond is for safety before anything else, a claim of the tradition about a pattern, not a statement about any particular household.

The story

Of all Juno's Roman titles, Lucina is the one that touches birth. Wikipedia explains it as her name as she who brings children into light, and connects it with the protection of delivery. Her temple stood in a sacred grove, and Servius Tullius is said to have ordered the gifts for a newborn to be placed in its treasury. The annual festival of the Matronalia was held there on March 1, the day of the temple's dedication, and on that day lambs and cattle were sacrificed to her in the grove on the Cispius. In the Greek material the same office belongs to Hera, who is called the protector of women during childbirth, while Eileithyia, goddess of childbirth at Argos and Athens, is her daughter in the Theogony. The pages also note her hostile use of that power, since she is said to have sent witches to hinder Alcmene's delivery until Historis, daughter of Tiresias, deceived them. A goddess standing at the threshold of a birth suits a sign the tradition reads through shelter, family and the beginning of a household.

Written from

Corpus key point:Juno:sign:Cancer.