Анна Шиман
Draft translation. This text was translated automatically and has not been proofread yet — if something reads oddly, it does.
The four corners of fate. The cardinal axes in astropsychology. Analysing the I, VII, IV and X houses through Symbolon cards.
The four corners of fate. On the great inner Discord.
Every psychological journey begins in a fog of “not knowing”. For 5 months now on our Symbolon cards course we have been travelling through the archetypes of the zodiac, and we ended our last session in the shifting waters of the twelfth archetype, Pisces, living through moments of total dissolution and the deceptive euphoria of our own generosity. But every dissolution has a price: it is all too easy and sweet to get stuck in it and lose your bearings. When the fog lifts, a person inevitably runs into the harsh structure of reality. “Harshness” is the word of the planet Saturn.
And if you still hope that the world is unimaginably infinite and chaotic, while structure, hierarchy and the laws of cause and effect feel like a heavy burden, congratulations: your Saturn is not yet inside you.
Our psyche is a structured field standing on four unshakeable supports. In astropsychology they are called the cardinal points of the horoscope, the axes of the First–Seventh and Fourth–Tenth houses.
If you want to see the structure of your fate, draw a simple cross on a sheet of paper. Four directions. Four supports of your inner kingdom.
0° (Aries) is the point of the primal impulse, the cusp of the I house.
90° (Cancer) is the deep, dark well of memory and ancestral roots, the IV house.
180° (Libra) is the fair mirror in which the Other is reflected, the VII house.
270° (Capricorn) is the icy summit of social achievement, the X house.
Fate is merciless in its laws, whether you like it or not! If the planets in your chart line up in opposition (180°), you are the lucky owner of a permanent, exhausting inner war.
If there is a square between them (90°), crises will burst in suddenly, like a stray car at a T-junction, demanding immediate action.
But the true purpose of this existential blueprint is to make a person move their Ego from the warring outskirts to the very centre of their personality. To the place where your connection with the Self is born.
Part I. The horizontal of earthly existence. The Mask and its Shadow
A person has no right to reach for spiritual verticals until they have built their earthly horizontal, the axis of the I and VII houses. Without a clear, conscious “I” we are doomed to remain driftwood in a raging ocean. Such a person will forever rush about the outer rim of the wheel of fortune and painfully hit the corners of chance circumstances.
The Ascendant. A mask that has become skin, or the “false self”.
The First house is our Ascendant. The mask that the psyche created in childhood for the sake of survival and adaptation. Jung called it the Persona. The key to this mask is held by the ruler of your Ascendant, the main planet of your horoscope.
But look at the story that plays out inside when the element of this mask comes into conflict with the primal fire of Aries, the dispositor of the first house!
When watery, vulnerable signs (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces) rise on the Ascendant, the person is paralysed by an inner block. They are afraid to show themselves openly. They either need sterile, hothouse conditions or declare a great guerrilla war on the world, retreating into a stubborn defence.
When the Ascendant falls in Aries, Leo or Sagittarius, the fire doubles. There is a dangerous excess. Such a person becomes a hostage to their impulse: they act first and think later. The world seems to them an eternal barricade, and so a furious, exhausting script of the eternal fighter is born inside.
The Descendant. The dark double, or “fatal obsession”.
Opposite the Ascendant, the Seventh house, the Descendant, always looms in silence. It is the greatest and most frightening mystery of the chart (after the eighth house, of course). It is the house of partners and… the house of our worst enemies. Everything that we were forbidden, or forbade ourselves, to show in childhood has gone there, into the cellars of the unconscious. Our Shadow.
While a person is psychologically immature, they remain blind, and their egocentrism is inflated to fill the whole world. They see the world only through the lens of their own rightness and look to people only for confirmation of their magnificence. But the partner at the other end of the axis also has their own inner Aries, their first house, their own egoism! When these two boundless psychic fields collide, a war of interests flares up. That is why we often fall blindly in love with someone, projecting our Shadow onto them, and then drag the relationship along for years like a suitcase without a handle: unbearable to carry and a pity to throw away.
Let us look at the Cancer – Capricorn axis in the context of the first and seventh houses.
Before us is a person with the Ascendant in sensitive, watery Cancer. Cancer is secretive by nature; it cannot fight head-on, yet it passionately wants to dominate, infantilely “appropriating” the people close to it. Cancer is a cardinal sign, and we have to take that into account. Opposite it, in the VII house, the Descendant in Capricorn rises like an icy monument.
From the position of the Ascendant, Cancer looks at its Capricorn partner, whom fate has washed up on its shore, and sees a calculating scoundrel, a cold, unfeeling brute, a manipulator and a slowcoach. But instead of unclenching its grasping claws and running back to its swamp, Cancer is hypnotised by this icy rock. In a desperate attempt to melt the ice it oversteps every possible boundary. And, of course, it smashes against the Capricorn wall, drowning in tears, feeling rejected and used. They speak completely different languages.
In a desperate attempt to take possession of Capricorn, infantile Cancer switches on its whole arsenal of domestic and emotional terrorism. Since it is afraid to fight openly and head-on (the Martian way), which is why Mars is weakened in Cancer, its expansion looks like a soft, suffocating siege.
Cancer totally castrates other people’s boundaries (“But I’m looking after you!”)
This is the very “care” that makes you want to howl and run to the ends of the earth. Cancer starts to control the partner’s daily life completely, hiding behind sacred motives. Without asking, it rearranges the things on Capricorn’s desk (“I just tidied up, it was a mess in here”), buys clothes to its own taste and makes the partner throw out the old ones, and force-feeds them. It is an attempt to turn an adult Capricorn into a helpless infant who will be lost and starve to death without Cancer. In Symbolon the sign of Cancer is the Mother card, and through this “motherhood” Cancer tries to melt the ice of its Capricorn.
Cancer is passive-aggressive and takes mortal offence!
If Capricorn tries to protect its boundaries (for example, closes the study door to work, or stays silent in response to accusations and hysterics), Cancer will not make a scene. It switches into the mode of the silent martyr, while inside it plays an endless film in which it punishes the offender. Incidentally, this is how Cancer learns to integrate Capricorn’s qualities (at first it withdraws and seethes inside). It is the classic “demonstrative silence” that lasts for days. The person walks around the flat with pursed lips, sighs pointedly, rattles the dishes in the kitchen. To the question “What’s wrong?” the icy answer is: “Nothing. Everything’s fine.” The aim is to make the heartless egoist Capricorn choke on guilt and crawl back on its knees with apologies.
Emotional blackmail and tears on schedule are the main weapon of the sign of Cancer.
Water is the element of feelings, and infantile Cancer often uses tears not as an expression of pain but as an instrument of harsh manipulation.
As soon as Capricorn switches on its dry logic and tries to discuss the problem constructively (“how can I help you?”), Cancer instantly throws a tantrum or starts to cry: “You talk to me like a boss at work! You don’t love me! I’m nothing to you!” Every serious conversation is drowned in tears. Capricorn, who by nature cannot stand other people’s hysterics, gives in and accepts Cancer’s terms just to turn off the fountain.
Fateful “toughness tests”, or a permanent test of loyalty.
Because a black hole of paranoia and fear of rejection gapes inside immature Cancer, it constantly tests Capricorn’s strength. These are regular provocations and interrogations. “Who was that calling you?”, “Why were you 15 minutes late?”, “You looked at that waitress, you like her more, don’t you?” Cancer may deliberately play at weakness and “fall ill” on Capricorn’s most important working day to see whether it will drop its big deal for Cancer’s sake. If Capricorn chooses work, Cancer gets a cast-iron reason for a global tragedy: “You traded me for your schedules!” And this, incidentally, opens a real chance to grow within the relationship through the constant testing of boundaries, which in Capricorn are made of iron. If Capricorn doesn’t lose its temper and leave its Cancer, infantile Cancer has a good chance of building those boundaries within itself through this contact.
Creating an “emotional cocoon” and isolation
Cancer dreams day and night of the two partners shutting themselves in a single shell, cut off from the whole world. This is a dream of deep dissolution and merging that grows out of an unintegrated mother complex.
Gently but insistently it starts to keep Capricorn’s friends away from the home and to criticise its colleagues and relatives. “Your mother is using you”, “Your friend is a bad influence on you”. Cancer tries to cut off all of Capricorn’s outside connections so as to become its only source of company, warmth, food and life.
The result is a terrible paradox. Cancer is so desperately afraid that cold Capricorn will leave it that it creates an unbearable, stifling atmosphere for it with its own hands. Capricorn starts to feel caught in a sticky web where it is starved of oxygen, and its natural reaction is to become even colder, even harder, and to lock every lock. The circle of hell closes.
The way out of this hell lies within the axis itself. We see that the Capricorn partner is not an external enemy but the repressed Shadow of Cancer itself. Then we can decide to stop hanging on someone else’s shoulders and demanding stormy emotions from an icy rock.
For integration we need to find the infantile, capricious child within and take a look at our “mother complex”. To start consciously cultivating Capricorn qualities in ourselves: firm structure, an understanding of other people’s boundaries, cool expediency and inner support. As soon as Cancer integrates Capricorn’s qualities within itself, the external problem of partnership closes as no longer needed.
Part II. The vertical of achievement in the horoscope. Between past and future
If the horizontal axis (I and the Other) is out of balance, the vertical axis of achievement (the IV – X houses) turns into a rack on which a human fate is executed. The person begins to be torn wildly between “I want” and “I must”, between filial duty and social rebellion.
Unable to bear the tension, the psyche collapses into one of two extremes:
Falling into the IV house (the swamp of the past). The person goes into endless, lifelong work with a psychologist. For decades they dig through childhood grievances, explore ancestral traumas, mum, childhood, turning their life into a hopeless lament for what “never came to be”. Or they never get as far as a psychologist, and instead live in grievance and suffering and turn to magicians and fortune-tellers.
Falling into the X house (the illusion of the future). A panicked flight from inner emptiness into total workaholism, neurotic anxiety and a façade of “successful success”. The person builds a career, climbs to the top, but inside remains the same frightened, hungry child.
Remember the law of Hermes Trismegistus: “As above, so below.” What you have become aware of within yourself instantly rebuilds the material world outside. Tighten up the inner, and the outer will follow automatically.
Let us look at this example, which I called “The Sword against the Rose”, and analyse the first and seventh houses in a real woman’s chart.
I house in Aries (Symbolon archetype: the Raging Warrior, Mars).
VII house in Libra (Symbolon archetype: the Lover, Venus).
IV house in Cancer (the Mother, the Moon).
X house in Capricorn (the Sage, Saturn).
In the space of her soul, her Warrior and her Lover stand facing each other, separated by an ominous crack in the earth. In the Symbolon archetypes this position is called just that: the “Discord” card. All her life the woman balances on the edge of this precipice. Her Aries Ascendant turns egocentrism up to full power, shouting: “Everything will be the way I see it, the world is war!” And her Libra Descendant demands diplomacy, concessions and social etiquette, which to Aries seem fake and false. As long as this conflict lives in the shadow, the gateway to vertical achievement (to the Sage in the X house) is firmly blocked.
Here the woman vitally needs to conclude an inner peace treaty by finding the card of synthesis and, through it, the door to her core inner conflict. To stop defending herself where no one is attacking, and to give up egocentrically “ramming” every obstacle in her path. To realise that Libra and partnership are not a loss of self, not a lie and not a false mask, but her own need for harmony.
The synthesis here is to build a bridge over this crack. To allow her inner Warrior to become the noble defender of the Lover’s interests. The Lover who is not somewhere outside, but inside the woman herself, in the shadow. To learn to see and respect other people’s boundaries without sliding into a sticky, suffocating merger. As soon as this balance is found, the woman gains rightful access to the summit of Capricorn, to true social maturity and wisdom.
So the masks are off and the framework of fate is laid bare. The first place to start your analysis is to find the ruler of your Ascendant. It is this planet that sets the time, the place and the rules of your individual life script, your journey to the Self.
Are you ready to look into your Shadow and stop the war on the outskirts in order to find your centre?
If so, join our online course on Symbolon cards.
We will find your point of synthesis and see exactly which inner “Discord” is keeping you from finding your true Self.
Anna Shyman, psychologist.
