Water · Cardinal
The 12 Zodiac Signs: Dates, Elements and TraitsCancer
37% · waxing crescent
The Sun is in this sign in 2026
June 21 – July 21
The usual table says : June 21 – July 22
The boundary is an astronomical instant, not a calendar day, so it moves by up to two days across the years. If you were born within a day of one, only your birth time settles it.
- Element
- Water
- Modality
- Cardinal
- Ruler
- Moon
- Polarity
- Night (negative)
- Opposite sign
- Capricorn
What the tradition says
Cardinal water: the sign that builds a place to come back to. Cancer leads the way most people miss, by making the conditions in which other people can do things — and it remembers, which is both the warmth and the difficulty.
In love
Attaches deeply and defends what it has attached to. The sideways move is real: a hurt Cancer withdraws rather than argues, and the withdrawal is easy to misread as indifference.
At work
Reads a room before it reads a report, which makes it good where people are the problem. Needs a stable base to work from; reorganise the team around a Cancer often enough and the care goes somewhere else.
Strengths
caring · perceptive · protective
Difficulties
moody · guarded · slow to forget
The three decans
0° – 10°
Moon
ruler: Cancer
10° – 20°
Mars
ruler: Scorpio
20° – 30°
Jupiter
ruler: Pisces
Each sign is divided into three ten-degree faces, ruled in turn by the rulers of the three signs of its own element. The decan is a real subdivision of the sign, not a second sign.
With the other eleven
Trine120°
The same element, and it shows. This is the one that asks for no effort: you understand each other without explaining. It is also the one where nobody pushes.
Sextile60°
Elements that get on: fire with air, earth with water. It works well once you start, but you have to start — this one does nothing by itself.
Semisextile30°
The sign next door. You have almost nothing in common — different element, different mode — and yet you keep crossing paths. Neither conflict nor obviousness.
Quincunx150°
Nothing shared at all — not the element, not the mode, not even day and night. This is the one that needs the most translating, and it does not settle on its own.
Square90°
The same mode, elements that pull against each other. It grates — and the grating is what moves things: you do not pick problems up by the same end.
Opposition180°
Face to face, across the whole zodiac. What you leave undone, the other does — which makes it the most magnetic of the seven and the most tiring.
The relationship between two signs is the angle between them, and there are only seven. Same sign, then thirty degrees apart, sixty, ninety, a hundred and twenty, a hundred and fifty, and opposite.
What is measured, then what the tradition makes of it
Work it out for yourself
- Zodiac Sign CalculatorBorn within a day or two of a cusp? Printed date tables are a day out some years — this one uses the Sun's real position.
- Birth Chart CalculatorYour sign is the Sun alone. The whole chart has ten bodies, twelve houses and the angles — and needs your birth time.
- Sun, Moon & Rising Sign CalculatorThe three that a reading usually means by "your sign": Sun, Moon and Rising.
- Zodiac Sign Compatibility CalculatorThe angle between two signs, and what the tradition makes of each of the seven.
Measured, and recounted
The dates, the decan boundaries and the angles to the other signs are computed — from the Sun's real position for the year in question, and from arithmetic. Everything under "what the tradition says" is exactly that: convention, some of it two thousand years old, presented as convention and not as a finding about you.