Cancer 3

Symbol

The modern symbol for Cancer is the crab, but it has been represented with various types of creatures, usually those live in the water, and always those with an exoskeleton, decapods in particular.
In the Egyptian records of about 2000 BC it was described as Scarabaeus (Scarab), the sacred emblem of immortality, although Peter Jensen claimed this sign had been a tortoise in Babylonia, and that it was so figured there and in Egypt 4000 BC.
In the 12th century, an illustrated astronomical manuscript shows it as a water beetle. Albumasar writes of this sign in the work published in 1489 as a large crayfish. Bartschtshitius and Stanislaus Lubienitzki, in the 17th century, described it as a lobster.

As the constellation vaguely resembles a crab, it may, together with the Hydra constellation, form the basis of the myth of the Lernaean Hydra, one of The Twelve Labours of Hercules, with which it is associated. Many people debate whether its a crab or lobster.[who?]
Cancer is said to have been the place for the Akkadian Sun of the South, perhaps from its position at the winter solstice in very remote antiquity. But afterwards it was associated with the fourth month Duzu (June-July in the modern western calendar), and was known as the Northern Gate of Sun.

Showing but few stars, and its lucida being less than a 4th-magnitude, it was often considered "Dark Sign", quaintly described as black and without eyes. Dante, alluding to this faintness and position of heavens, wrote in Paradiso:
Thereafterward a light among them brightened,So that, if Cancer one such crystal had,Winter would have a month of one sole day.