The Ruthless Feminine: Cancer, Artemis, and the Power to Protect

My long-standing obsession with The Hunger Games and Katniss Everdeen sparked a new and unexpected insight recently. Every few years, I find myself binge-watching the series again—drawn back into a story that ignites feminine rage and empowerment like few others. I believe the franchise’s enduring power lies in the fact that Katniss awakens something buried deep within the female psyche. She is the warrior driven by the emotional heart—fierce, instinctual, and protective.

As I do with nearly everything, I couldn’t help but watch the films through an astrological lens, trying to identify the archetypes embodied by Katniss, Peeta, Gale, and the rest. But it was Katniss who stood out most clearly. She is undeniably Cancerian. More than that, The Hunger Games—and Katniss herself—feel like a modern retelling of the myth of Artemis. Whether Suzanne Collins consciously intended this or not, it is hard to believe the parallels are accidental. The similarities between the Goddess of the Hunt and our beloved Mockingjay are uncanny.

This realization helped me reconcile something that has long challenged me in astrological interpretation. As a Cancer rising myself, this is an archetype I deeply identify with. Known primarily for nurturing, softness, emotional attunement, and mothering, I struggled to understand how Artemis—the goddess of the cold-blooded kill—could belong to the same symbolic lineage. But through Jennifer Lawrence’s flawless embodiment of Katniss Everdeen, everything clicked.

Most female heroines in modern media are still portrayed through a subtly masculine lens. Their power is expressed through emotional restraint, relentless optimism, and stoic, unfeeling courage. Strength, in these stories, is often defined by the ability to suppress vulnerability. Katniss is nothing like that. She is governed almost entirely by instinct and emotion. She has little interest in foresight or long-term strategy. Instead, she responds moment by moment, guided by how she feels and who she needs to protect.

When her emotions surface, they do so in raw, unfiltered bursts: the soul-splitting scream when Cinna is murdered before her second Games, or the silent, shaking tears when President Snow signals that Peeta Mellark is in danger. She does not pause to intellectualize her pain. She reacts. And this, to me, is the absolute essence of Cancer.

Cancer is often reduced to softness—sentimentality, emotionality, the maternal ideal. It is associated with the womb, but perhaps the womb is far more instinctual, fierce, and uncompromising than we have been taught to believe. The womb is not only a place of gentleness; it is a place of protection. It decides who belongs inside and who does not. The womb, in its truest form, is the people we love. They come before all else. This is tribal consciousness at its most ancient.

The womb creates life regardless of circumstance. It does not wait for safety, permission, or ideal conditions. The female body becomes a protective battleground for the developing fetus—reshaping itself, absorbing shock, enduring depletion, vulnerability, and pain so that life can continue. In childbirth, a woman quite literally marches into pain. Not as a performance of strength, but as an act of inevitability. There is no strategy, no bypass—only instinct and endurance so that life can pass through.

This realization ignites a deep feminine rage within me—one born from seeing how clearly patriarchal culture has fractured womanhood into only the parts it finds palatable. The mother is allowed to be soft, nurturing, self-sacrificing—but never dangerous. Never enraged. Never feral. And yet, in the animal kingdom, the mother, like Artemis in the Pantheon, is often the most feared creature of all. She does not negotiate when her young are threatened. She does not explain. She acts.

The cult of Artemis was known for roaming the forests with her beloved band of virgin huntresses—wild maidens devoted to one another and to the sanctity of their bond. Artemis was not cruel, but she was unwavering. If a man attempted to violate or even spy upon her maidens, she would kill him without hesitation. This was not vengeance. It was protection. Sacred, instinctual, absolute.

This is the same energy that drives Katniss again and again—most notably in her relentless protection of her sister, Prim Everdeen. Katniss does not fight because she wants to be a hero. She fights because something innocent is under threat. She is not interested in conquest or glory. She is interested in survival and continuity. She is Artemis reborn.

Cancer is not a weak sign. In fact, it may be the most ruthless of all—but in a way that is deeply misunderstood. Astrologically, we tend to assign ruthlessness to the martial signs: Aries with its love of battle, Scorpio with its endurance of inner war. But Cancer’s ruthlessness is different. Aries fights to conquer. Scorpio fights to survive the self. Cancer fights because the womb must be protected. And without the womb—without safety, continuity, belonging—nothing else can exist.

This understanding inevitably draws me to the IC and the 4th house in the birth chart. I often tell clients that the IC is the plate upon which the rest of the chart is served. It is the unseen foundation beneath everything else—the soil, the roots, the inner chamber where life is first held. You can have ambition, visibility, brilliance, and success elsewhere in the chart, but without a stable root, the entire structure eventually collapses.

The IC represents the womb of the chart: the mother, the ancestral field, the emotional ground from which the self emerges. It is not loud. It is not performative. It does not seek recognition. And yet, it is the core of all existence. What happens here determines how safe we feel to exist at all—how we attach, how we protect ourselves, how we defend what we love.

This brings us to the Moon—Cancer’s ruling luminary—and an insight that reshaped the way I interpret charts. The Moon is often described as emotion, intuition, and feeling, but that language barely scratches the surface. The Moon is the whim of existence—the instinctual force that decides, in any given moment, whether life advances, retreats, or defends itself.

The Moon can be slightly cold in its defense, just as Artemis is, just as Katniss is. There is a detachment here that is often misunderstood as emotional absence, when in truth it is precision. Lunar instinct is not concerned with morality, optics, or explanation. It is concerned with protecting the tribe. Everything else falls away.

Understanding the Moon this way also clarifies a crucial distinction between lunar instinct and Ceres. These archetypes are often collapsed into a single idea of “the mother,” but they serve very different functions. The Moon governs immediate safety, emotional reflex, and the protection of the womb. Ceres governs nourishment over time—feeding, tending, grief, and the sustaining of life after loss.

The Moon protects the womb.
Ceres sustains what grows from it.

Where Artemis draws the bow without hesitation, Ceres stays behind to cultivate the field. Where the Moon reacts in the moment of threat, Ceres teaches us how to endure the seasons that follow. Both are maternal. Both are feminine. But one defends life at all costs, while the other teaches us how to live with what life demands.

Even within The Hunger Games, Katniss is repeatedly described as difficult—impulsive, emotional, hard to work with, lacking strategy. And yet, in the end, Panem does not need another tactician or general. It needs a mother. Someone who makes the people feel something again. Someone whose instinct reawakens the collective heart.

Katniss has no formal training. She is the underdog. But she survives again and again because she trusts her instincts. She listens to her body. She reacts without hesitation. Feeling, in her case, is not a liability—it is her greatest weapon.

This is the Cancerian truth we have forgotten: instinct is intelligence. Emotion is survival. And the feminine, when rooted in protection rather than performance, is one of the most formidable forces there is.

The mother is not weak.
The womb is not passive.
And Cancer—like Artemis, like Katniss—is not here to be palatable.

She is here to protect what must live.