♋ Cancer · 10 to 20 degrees
The second decan of Cancer
Cancer with Mercury: feeling that has to be talked about in order to be understood.
At a glance
| Degrees | 10 to 20 degrees of Cancer |
|---|---|
| Face ruler (Chaldean) | Mercury |
| Decanate ruler (modern) | Scorpio (ruler: Pluto, and Mars traditionally) |
| Golden Dawn card | Three of Cups |
| Element and modality | water, cardinal |
Mercury in the second face of Cancer is read as the emotional life given words. Memory is atmospheric rather than factual here, and conversation is a genuine need.
Associated with writing about feeling, and with rumination when there is nobody to say it to.
Two systems, two answers
There are two decan rulership systems in circulation and they give different rulers for the same ten degrees. The older face system runs the seven classical planets in Chaldean order around the whole zodiac, and gives this decan to Mercury. The modern decanate system gives each decan to one of the three signs of its own element, here Scorpio.
Neither is presented here as the correct one. The tarot attributions follow the face system, most popular modern astrology follows the decanate system, and knowing which one a source is using explains most of the apparent contradictions you will find elsewhere.
What Mercury means →The tarot connection
The Golden Dawn mapped the 36 decans onto the 36 minor arcana pips, two through ten. This decan is the Three of Cups, which is why that card carries Mercury and Cancer as its attributions in any Golden Dawn-derived deck.
The pips run by modality rather than in zodiacal order: the cardinal sign of each element takes two to four, the fixed sign five to seven, and the mutable sign eight to ten. It is the detail most often got wrong, including by us until a test caught it.
Three of Cups on Memento Arcana →Which decan are you?
Your decan is decided by the degree of your Sun, not by the date alone, and the chart gives you the degree of every planet as well.
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