Jupiter in Cancer

Few positions warm Jupiter as thoroughly as this one. Faith rests in family, in continuity, in the idea that people looked after properly will turn out well, and the evidence generally cooperates. The house fills up: relatives, strays, a friend's child through a bad year, someone between jobs who stays eight months. Luck comes through the mother's line, through property, through inheritance in the broad sense, and through the reliable fact that people remember who fed them and return the favour decades later.

The teaching is done by care rather than instruction. They pass on recipes, family stories, the correct way to sit with someone who is grieving. Their emotional generosity is genuine and inexhaustible in a way that surprises more guarded people, and it produces a wide circle held together by obligation and affection in roughly equal measure. Money, when they have it, tends to be spent on the house and on the people in it rather than on themselves, and they consider this the natural order of things.

The excess is nourishment that does not stop. Adults who were never allowed to struggle, help offered so completely that the person helped never develops the capacity to manage, a family that has grown dependent on one person's endless provision. Sentiment enlarges the past until no present arrangement measures up to it. From inside it is love. From outside it can be a soft cage, and the honest ones eventually notice how much of their giving was also a way of keeping everyone close.