Neptune in Cancer

Neptune sat in Cancer for about fourteen years at the opening of the twentieth century, so this belongs to a cohort now almost entirely gone. What it dreamed of was belonging. The hearth, the family table, the mother country; these were not sentimental decorations for that generation but articles of faith, and men marched considerable distances to defend them. The homesickness in the popular songs of the period is not an accident of fashion. It is the placement speaking in its own voice.

The deception was in the idealising itself. A remembered home is not a real one, and a generation that consecrated the domestic could not easily see the cruelty that sometimes lived inside it. Mothers were placed beyond criticism. Nations were treated as families and therefore as owed unconditional loyalty. From inside, this felt like tenderness and rootedness; from outside, especially to the generation that followed, it looked like sentimentality armoured against inconvenient fact.

In an individual nineteen-hundreds chart, the house tells where that longing for shelter settled. Fourth house, and the childhood home became a shrine, whether or not it deserved one; ninth, and the faith itself was mothering. Aspects to the Moon are the strongest thread, marking those in whom the generational nostalgia became a private weather system. The cohort left behind an enormous body of memoir, most of it truthful about feeling and unreliable about fact.