You’ll gather lots of clues to the Cancerian nature by doing some moon-gazing on a clear night in the country. It may be hard to see it through the smog in the city, but you can always study an almanac. Notice the moon’s changing shape and appearance. As it waxes and increases in light, it slowly grows into a perfect, round ball in the sky. When it wanes, it gradually disappears, so there’s nothing visible but a thin sliver of light with a faint, silver shimmer.
The Cancerian’s passing moods are synchronized to the moon, answering to the same mysterious lunar influence that causes the tides of the ocean to flow in and out. Yet, the moon doesn’t really change at all. It just seems to. Likewise, the Cancerian remains the same person through all his fluctuating highs and lows. Such dependable periodicity—constant in its inconstancy—makes the crab easy to recognize, once you know the phase he’s in when you see him.
You may first come across him when he’s laughing the “crazy lunar laugh.” It’s inescapably contagious. It runs up and down the scales with a deep, throaty undertone. It giggles and gurgles, then finally erupts in a loud cackle that sounds exactly like two hundred hens laying two hundred perfect eggs. In his life-of-the-party mood, you’ll have no trouble finding the Cancerian. He’ll be the funniest one in the room, a laugh a minute. If he’s not performing himself, then he’ll be grinning at someone else’s antics. No one likes a joke better than Cancer, and his funny side is all the more startling when it pops up so incongruously from his normally quiet, gentle personality. Lunar humor runs deep. It’s never shallow or superficial, because it stems from the sensitive observation of human behavior. Cancer may not wear his lunar laugh every day, but he can always dig it out of his old trunk in the basement at a moment’s notice.