Jupiter in Cancer and Family Astrology

I moved house a couple of years ago and it's taken some time to settle and get organised. I found myself recently finishing half-painted rooms and finally managing to convince my son to let me redecorate his. He's a Pisces with a Gemini Moon and if you can imagine one of those old junk shops full of knick knacks and cobwebs you've a fairly accurate picture of his living space. Don't get me wrong, he does vacuum and tidy once a week, but we're talking shove-it-away in-a-corner-and-hoover-a-space-in-the-middle kind of clean. The room is just too cluttered to be able to clean it properly. It took us nearly three days to clear, sort and paint, but after the initial reluctance he's really happy with the new room. And he's just had his first Jupiter Return.

His Cancerian Jupiter is in the 2nd house of possessions, and he accumulates stuff like you wouldn't believe. Stones, sticks, bits of moss, pine cones, coins, toys, anything and everything that twinkles at that Gemaniac moon comes home with him. Nothing can be thrown away because he 'might need it for one of my inventions'. (He has 3 planets in Aquarius, but that's another story). The problem with this though, is that Jupiter trines his Sun and Venus in Pisces, and with all that water he ends up drowning in a sea of jumble, getting so overwhelmed he doesn't know what he has anymore. He forgets much of it and ends up playing with just a couple of things that are easy to get at. For me it's a lesson in the importance of oppositions and just how much we need the experience of the sign opposite to the Sun.

Clearly he needs the Virgo, particularly as he has no planets in the sign and a very big empty 6th house with Virgo on the cusp. The 6th house rules our everyday life, habits, work and health, what Stephen Arroyo calls 'learning through immediate experience with material affairs'. He needs to learn the virgoan qualities of focus, order and detail if he is to be able to channel that piscean creativity and imagination in a way that benefits him. If he has some order in his life he can access more of his gifts. Instead, he's been using only a small portion of what he has because the rest is in such disarray.

After the Great Reordering he decided to have a go at fixing his model railway which had been sitting on a shelf gathering dust for two years because he thought it was broken. He set it up, and lo and behold it worked after all. The happy dancing hasn't stopped for three days now:) Nor the plans to extend the track...

Interestingly, my Scorpio Moon falls in his 6th house. I'm a divil for the purging. His Sun Venus conjunction falls in my 6th house, right on my Jupiter. With Pisces in my 6th house I've had problems myself for years with messy living conditions, but having a Virgo Pluto in the 12th I finally came to understand the importance for me of having tidy surroundings. If I have to live in mess and dirt I become overwhelmed, irritable and depressed, I literally cannot cope with anything. My inner life becomes a reflection of the outer. It's something I've had to learn, and still deal with every day.

So as his mother, I've seen this dynamic play out with him and can help. There's a certain beauty in the way nature gives us exactly what we need. My own mother was a Virgo and used to scold and shout about my mess. She had a Pisces Moon which fell in my 6th, so no help there! She was so overwhelmed by the mess of five kids in a big house that she had a cleaning lady to help, which is another way of accessing the Virgo if you can afford it. No one ever actually showed me how to be tidy, or explained the value of order. It's something I learned much later in life as part of a spiritual practice, which I guess makes sense with a 6th house Pisces Jupiter.

This, of course, is how Pisces really wants to do it:)

I find it fascinating, unpicking these kinds of astrological threads and the way they run through the family line. What astro themes have you noticed in your own family?