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TWELVE PHASES OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE: ARIES
Piercing through the crust of the soil which the melting of snow softened, the sprouting seed forces its life into the light of the sun. The fervent up-reaching of spring brings forth the wonder of germination. The Day-force now balances in intensity the waning Night-force. The player who leaves the stage will soon be but a memory, however potent this memory may be in the recesses of the human psyche. The new star asserts his right before the foot-lights of the human consciousness. Henceforth, the show will be his. Yet, his voice is unassured; his countenance reveals hidden fears in its very bravado. In Aries the human personality experiences its phase of adolescence.
Until puberty comes to the growing child the horizon of personality is mapped by the walls of some enclosing matrix. First, the mother's womb; then, the more diversified space of the family, holding within its secure walls increasing conflicts. But, whether bounded by physical or psychological envelopes, the personality of the child is still at the prenatal stage. It is enfolded by collective nature. It struggles to emerge. Emergence the wonder and the fear of it is adolescence. The adolescent is born as a separate person in a world which seems hostile or alien; which must be conquered; which must not be feared.
Fear mixed with eager expectancy, awkwardness, emotional confusion this is the adolescent. He rushes in desire; swiftly recoils at the least hurt. He is bold, in a giggling way. Compelled by an inner necessity to go on, he asserts himself with blatancy and daring; yet he wishes he could withdraw to the security of mother-earth. The least wind of fate makes shrink and suffer this "lamb" at heart rushing headlong like a "ram."
This psychological description of adolescence characterizes the basic nature of the Aries type; his emotional instability and his disordinate, fate-compelled desire; his acute sensitiveness masquerading under a "devil-may-care" attitude; his sheer instinctuality and his often bombastic self-assertiveness which is actually not real self-centeredness but rather the outcome of a bio-psychological compulsion deeply and fatefully experienced. The Aries human being is compelled from within to acquire at any cost a self; compelled to force his remote individual soul to assume the burden of incarnation. He does not seek power in order to satisfy himself, but to demonstrate himself to himself the power necessary for him to become a personality. And if he seems needy for love and fame, for "women, wine and song" it is because he feels weak or uncertain within himself and needs constant reassurance and outer sustainment.
Because in him the Day-force barely overcomes the Night-force, the Aries person has to throw his conscious ego acutely, at times almost desperately, into his will to live and he often overdoes it. His nostalgia is as great as his impatience; his sentimentality as romantic as his passion is sharp, direct yet short-lived and subject to fits of revulsion. More than any other zodiacal type he loves his need for love rather than a particular person. And he needs love because he is fundamentally afraid of the world and lonely; yet he is just as fearful of the bondage implied in a permanent union or association, because he must keep growing, he must constantly extend his budding personality, he must at all cost avoid standing still, which would soon mean lapsing into the past. His pioneer instinct is a disguised fear of routine and of the pull of tradition. He has to keep growing; and changing partners, changing his horizons and his allegiances gives him at least the sense of moving on, the illusion of growth.
The ordinary Aries type would, of course, deny violently these hidden springs of his actions. He cannot stop moving forward and try to understand himself. He is not building consciousness, but personality. He is no thinker, fundamentally; but rather a builder. He has to exert his urge to live. The Day-force is mounting up within him with phallic intensity. It does not matter what or where he builds. But he must feel himself in movement of destiny. He must feel himself acted upon by great energies.
A formed personality can act slowly, quietly, deliberately; because it acts from a relatively set basis of individual selfhood. But the Aries type is constantly in the process of forming himself. He has no sense of set selfhood; no sense of set boundaries. He is ever open to the inrush of universal, non-personified Life. He is never a finished product, and he cares little for finishing what he attempts. He is taken up by the act of creating, not by his creations. And therefore he needs to feel back of him, compelling him to create, more and more Power, more and more Life. All he wants is to dispense this Power to others, the fecundate virgin fields with it and to pass on, ardent with the impregnating of still vaster and "new" fields.
In that sense he is "impersonal." He is a giver but not of the things which are "his own." He is a giver of sheer energy, the energy of the Day-force that is bubbling forth in him. It is hard for him to make anything "his own." Yet if he does it, then he clings to that thing (for a while at least) with passion a passion born of fear and loneliness; because the thing becomes suddenly for him a symbol of his own personality the personality being actually the only one thing which he craves to "own" and or which he is never sure, for it never can be "finished."
Because in Aries the Day-force and the Night-force balance one another, the Aries person is always in a state of unstable equilibrium, pulled internally by opposites; thus restless, fretful, nervous, often neurotic. But his neuroses are actional ones, born of a sense of failure because of insurmountable obstacles, of weariness before the effort, or lack of personal interest in the actions, in the performing of which he may seem all the while to throw great energy or passion. That energy is not actually "his own." He is not in it. He is constantly seeking to fulfill himself as personality; but that goal is ever elusive always beyond, beyond. And so he keeps acting, desiring, emoting, creating barely succeeding in covering up by the stress of activity the emptiness and the fear of an eternal adolescence.
No one may know this among his associates. He is not only all taken up by action, but be is also an actor. He plays parts, and he loves the sense of being directed in his lines by an invisible Playwright; for that gives him a sense of security in his inherent destiny. He can easily become a great devotee; just because he is not sure of his own personality. He has, symbolically, "adolescent crushes" for some "Teacher," into whom he projects his passion for personality. Rather than display a weak personality of his own, he absorbs himself in the devotion to a great Personage but preferably one that is remote, ideal, absent. This absorption is always a "psychological projection" of his own yearning for personality. If he cannot act by outer show of creativeness and fecundation the part of personality, then be projects that yearning, transforming it in an intense (but often fitful) devotion for an ideal Figure, or for a "great Cause."
In Aries, personality is still not quite separated from the act. It is contained in the direct immediacy of an activity caused by an irrational power which, at one level, is "instinct" and at another "God." Action here is straightforward; yet because a sense of inner insecurity tends to bend down to the soil the adolescent shoot buffeted by social storms, this type of action needs often a prop. The Aries person has, however, to glorify this needed form of sustainment; to make it impersonal, so that his own personality be not weakened in the eyes of others or in his own eyes. Indeed he knows, subconsciously if not consciously, what he lacks. He knows that his personality is hardly as yet a concrete fact; that it is only emerging from the subjective state. But this means also that it is as yet rooted in the immensities of the collective life, that it is filled with potency filled with ιlan vital, with the surging and formative power of universal evolution . . . which many men have named God.
In Aries, the "pulsing of life" of the creative Breath is felt. It passes through. It surges forth and is gone. Aries power is the power of the lightning, which descends from above, which strikes out of the darkness of the Collective Unconscious. It is the power of revelation; power of Destiny released, which burns and fecundates. Such a power, from whatever level it operates in fiery down-flows, gives to the actions of an Aries person a peculiar pioneering, impersonal, perhaps cosmic and fateful strength. Indeed, in and through the noblest expressions of Aries power it is not an individual person who is at work, but humanity Man. At less exalted levels, a social or religious group, a nation, a race may voice their needs and state the solutions to these needs through such a person who is not quite a conscious personality and yet much more than an individual.
As such a person senses the meaning of the destiny which through him is becoming act, pride may roar through his ego. He may become arrogant. He may make demands upon society, as if all kinds of privileges were his "by divine right."' Yet, more often than not, his pride is rather adolescent, mixed with humility and a peculiar feeling of insecurity; for he knows inwardly that he does not own the source of the pride-giving power, that he might lose the contact and become empty. This differentiates the Aries pride from that typical of Leo; for in Leo, pride is centered in personality and rooted in a glory-seeking "I am." The Aries person will stress the "am" rather than the "I." His pride is in what he does, in what is done through him, in that great force which is at his command, in the powerful masculinity of his organism. It is not essentially in what he personally is; for he is never quite sure of what he is.
Aries is the dawn of personality as an objective and conscious fact in the cycle of human unfoldment. In that dawn the light of consciousness gradually sweeps through the Eastern sky, awakening all forces which belong to the realm of the Day. But there is still darkness in the West. The power of the Night is still holding sway over vast regions of the human psyche. Henceforth it will control the memory and gain possession of the regions below-the-horizon. These regions constitute the Unconscious.
As a man awakens, he meets his dreams the twilight memory of the Night-state of the psyche. Their irrationality haunts his awakenings. And because the pull of the Night-force is still strong and insistent, the Aries person clings with dogmatic or devotional intensity to "ideas," to "reason" and "logic." These are witnesses to the triumph of the Day-force over the irrational phantasms of the realm of Night. They are the bulwarks of form and consistency over chaos and pre-natal fears. But if the Aries person lets go of the conscious and withdraws inwardly, be finds himself well-nigh flooded with the prolific fantasy of his unconscious.
As the turning-point of the spring equinox is passed, the Night-force, overcome by the waxing intensity of the Day-force, leaves the stage of the conscious; but only to become introverted, subconscious or transcendent. We have already shown how this Night-force reaches fulfillment in Capricorn, in the fulfillment of the social-cultural ideal of togetherness the State. In the two subsequent zodiacal Signs, Aquarius and Pisces, that group-forming urge, that will to build a collective and permanent "greater whole" out of a multitude of personalities, becomes spiritualized, more-than-physical, more-than-social. Thus Aquarius symbolizes social idealism, social reform, social transformation under the influence of Uranus; and in Pisces we reach the concept of the "invisible Community," and "Church triumphant" in Heaven; the "Communion of the Saints," symbolized by Neptune.The Night-force in Aries operates in a still more transcendent manner. Its symbol is the "Lamb slain for the redemption of the world" in other words, martyrdom. In martyrdom the Aries person performs a transcendent type of action, one which is impelled by the great urge he has to live and to reach immortality as a self; for, to be a martyr is to become, in the eyes of society, the immortal symbol of a Cause. It is to be fulfilled in death as a personality.
This is the immortality of the seed, which dies as a seed so that there may be once more life and vegetation. It is the eternal Crucifixion of that which was sown in Libra. The seed dies into the new life, as night and the stars vanish into the glowing sunrise. And that death of night and stars, that death of the seed, haunts the subconscious of the Aries type who is not entirely absorbed in frantic activity and scattered fecundations. Thus the Aries vision, beyond the threshold of the conscious, yearns for the seed; which is to him, the Mother. While in his conscious nature he acts for the future, subconsciously he dreams of the past.
The balance between conscious and unconscious is very subtle in Aries and also in Libra. These two signs are signs of equilibrium, in which the Day-force and the Night-force are of nearly identical strength. "Nearly" identical only; because in Aries the Day-force has an outward momentum which assures its domination but a domination which must pay homage to the past, to the Night-force.
In one sense at least, the Aries person is called upon to sacrifice his past, to burn it on the altar of his dedication to the new life. This sacrifice could be a joyous or serene act; but the power of the Night-force in the subconscious often makes of it a dramatic martyrdom. Thus the feeling of self-pity so often found in Aries people. That self-pity is produced by the ebbing Night-force clinging still to its hegemony. It is a negative characteristic of Aries. Self-pity, weariness before the act, a sense of "What is the use," a sense of being a "Sacrificial victim" of destiny are all negative aspects of that sign. They can only be overcome when the conscious ego succeeds in "assimilating the contents of the Unconscious" (in C. G. Jung's terminology), when all the energies of the Aries type are embodied deliberately and consciously into a work and a destiny, consciously accepted and discharged.
Thus, Aries: its strength and its weakness, its burden of destiny. The song of Aries is a song of solar "exaltation" because in and through it the Sun "exalted" in Aries feels for the first time that victory has been won. This victory over the Night is celebrated on the nineteenth degree of Aries, the point of "ecstasy" of the solar force. It is the symbolical Resurrection-day, Easter. Later on, in Leo, the conscious solar ego will realize itself utterly in the joy of creative self-expression; but at Aries 19° the Day-force triumphs with the ablution of the first love of adolescence. Then Life pours exuberantly into the youth who feels himself dilated into the universe. It is indeed the Easter song of rejoicing the first blossomings of the trees, before Taurus' green leaves appear.
