Cancer Rashi

Karka remembers. A movable water rashi ruled by Chandra, it reads a room before anyone speaks and takes on the temperature of the people in it. Karka people build homes — literal ones, and the figurative kind that others come to for shelter. The cost is porousness: they carry moods that were never theirs. Learning where they end and someone else begins is the central task, and it is usually learned late.

Karka — known in English as Cancer — is the sidereal zodiac sign of the Crab, ruled by Chandra (Moon). It is a water (jal) rashi of movable (chara) quality: in Vedic astrology that pair describes how a sign begins things, holds them, or adapts to them.

In the sidereal zodiac the Sun passes through Karka from roughly 16 July to 16 August. Western astrology uses the tropical zodiac, where Cancer runs from 21 June – 22 July. The two differ by about 24 degrees — the ayanamsa — which is why your Vedic rashi is usually the sign before your Western one.

Karka contains Punarvasu (Pada 4), Pushya, Ashlesha. Each rashi spans 30 degrees and holds two and a quarter nakshatras, so the nakshatra locates a planet far more precisely than the rashi alone, and it is the nakshatra that determines your Vimshottari dasha sequence.

In Indian and Nepali practice your rashi is your Chandra rashi — the sign the Moon occupied at your birth, not the Sun. The Moon governs the mind, and it is the Moon's daily transit counted from your rashi that a daily rashifal actually reads.

In traditional matching, Cancer tends to find easy ground with Scorpio, Pisces, where the element and the ruling planets agree. Capricorn asks more work — not incompatibility, but a difference in pace and priority that has to be named rather than assumed. Ashtakoota Gun Milan looks at eight factors and not only the rashi, so treat sign-to-sign compatibility as a first indication rather than a verdict.