
Venus leaves Gemini’s mental agility parkour to pick up her knitting needles and heart strings as she enters the sign of Cancer. In Cancer, the heart wants what it wants: steadfast, nurturing, remembrance and soul bound loyalty. Venus in Cancer has an enduring quality that could parallel the intensity, depth and long-suffering of any Thomas Hardy character
Do you remember the scene in Mad Men where Don Draper brings a room of ad exes to their knees with a nostalgic interpretation of the Kodak carousel? He’s talking straight-up, non-adulterated Venus in Cancer. He shares that “the public can be engaged beyond flash, if they have a sentimental bond with the project.” He tells the men that the word nostalgia comes from the Greek, meaning “the pain from an old wound… a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.”
As he speaks, he flips through photographs of an earlier, more innocent and happier time. “This device is a time machine, ” he says, “Round and around back home again to a place we know we are loved.” This is exactly how Venus in Cancer would pitch the Kodak Carousel.
Lately I’ve been thinking of the word querencia. It comes from the Spanish verb querer, which means to desire and to want. It refers to when a place has completely captured you, become a part of your bones and interior landscape. You might have been there during your childhood, for decades or even just a short time. But it never left you. It’s as though you left a piece of your truest self there, and that piece haunts you to come back. Querencia refers to wanting to go back to this place once you’ve grown old and death is near.
Venus in Cancer feels like it contains this word querencia and all the layers that create it: haunted by a longing, deep sentimentalism, ancestry, nostalgia for the deep past, lost innocence, instinctual, integrity of self and recognition of the fracturing of that same self when removed from a person, place or thing where you felt complete, your querencia. Venus in Cancer wants to knit herself whole again. So she’s drawn to and attracts with nostalgic sentimentality, such as food and family, that lets her do just that.