If you haven’t already, I urge you to read the article explaining how the zodiac may be seen as a collection of twelve psychological types and thus gain context.
First Mode: Cardinal
Forces: 4↑ Day and 3↓ Night
Every cycle has a beginning. In the case of the zodiac as a yearly cycle of human experience, such start is Aries, when the germinating plant inches out, seeking sunlight after a long and cold winter. The Day and Night forces had equal intensity at the spring equinox, but just for an instant. In Aries, the Day Force has finally prevailed. After playing a supporting role in the opera of life since Libra, it finally gets the leading role. With a hint of insecurity in its voice and hidden fears in his boasting, in Aries the personality reaches adolescence.
Fear coupled with anxious anticipation, clumsiness and emotional confusion, such is life as an adolescent. He (or she) rushes toward desire but recoils at the slightest harm. He feels courageous. There is an internal need forcing him to bravely press ahead and yet he sometimes longs for the protection and security of “Mother Earth”. Such psychological sketch applies quite well to the nature of an Aries individual. He tends to exhibit emotional instability and instinctive desire, a keen sensitivity disguised as undisciplined behavior, a host of spontaneous changes, and an overcompensating belief in himself. Aries goal in life is to acquire a true identity, but that won’t happen yet since Cancer is the sign of the integrated personality. So, instead he seeks the power that will prove to himself that he is and not for self-satisfaction. He may go after “women, wine and dance”, external factors to combat his internal insecurities.
The Night Force is Still Strong
The Day Force has just overcome the Night Force. In the Aries individual, his nostalgia is as strong as his impatience. His sentimentalism as deeply felt as his passion. More than any other sign, he strongly feels the need for general love, more so than a love aimed at someone in particular. He needs love because he is fundamentally a person who fears the world and feels alone. Yet he cannot stomach the thought of servitude within a permanent union or association because he must continue growing and become the personality called for by the Day Force that is pushing with a phallic intensity, a personality slowly maturing in his psyche. He cannot stop, for stopping may entrap him in the past (Pisces) from which he just emerged. He has an instinctive fear of routine and must create a sense of movement by constantly changing structures, his own horizons and even loyalties, to generate the illusion of growth.
The Day Force is Eager
Any ordinary Aries type will be vehemently denying these hidden traits. He can’t stop moving ahead to spend time understanding himself, for he is not interested in generating consciousness but a personality. He may not be considered a thinker, independently of how deep his thoughts are, but a doer, a being in constant external activity. It matters little on what or where he acts as long as he feels to be moving in accordance to his destiny and spending large amounts of energy in the process. A more integrated personality may act more deliberately because his actions stem from a relatively-fixed individuality but the Aries type sees himself always in the process of formation. He doesn’t see himself as a finished product and, in fact, is not really interested in finishing what he starts. He is absorbed by the act of creating, not by his creations. He is mostly interested in fecundating one virgin field before proceeding to the next.
An Aries-type individual is what Rudhyar, himself Aries, called an “impersonal” person. He likes to give but not necessarily a part of him, he offers raw energy, the energy from the Day Force that is overflowing in him. He has trouble making something his own. However, should he do that, it will turn to be very important (at least for a while), becoming passionately attached to it with a passion born from fear and aloneness, and will make such motif the symbol of his personality, which is the only thing he truly yearns to make his own, and which he will never be sure of having completely since he never considers it “finished”.
A Precarious Equilibrium
As we said earlier, the Day and Night forces were in equilibrium at the equinox. At the cusps of every sign, there is a quantum jump in either the force’s intensities or their trending arrows. At the equinoxes the jump switches which force will be prevalent and the individual feels internally attracted to the two opposites. This will make the Aries type a nervous, restless, irritable and neurotic person, his neuroses motivated by what he does and arising from the feeling of not being able to reach that which he desires, perhaps due to insurmountable roadblocks or a lack of personal interest in his acts, which gives him a feeling of wasting much energy and passion. However, the energy wasted is not “his” but simply what he needs to continue moving ahead. Thus, his activities, desires, emotions and creations will never cease.
It is quite possible that people around him won’t notice any of this, for not only is he absorbed by action, he is also an actor. He will play a character who is directed by an invisible comedy writer in a way that he will feel security in his personal destiny. He may become devout of a grand cause due to his personal insecurities, having “adolescent romances” with some “Professor”, symbolically speaking, on whom he projects his yearning for a personality. But Aries feels the “pulse of life”, the power of Aries is like that of lightning coming from the Collective Unconscious, the power of revelation and Destiny. Such power gives a precursor and impersonal demeanor to the Aries individual conduct. Despite his wishes, the highest expression of Aries power is not a personality but Man, humanity as a whole. At a slightly lower level, a social group, a nation or race may be able to express its desires and needs through such an impetuous individual.
The Dark Side
As soon as he realizes that some higher destiny is being realized through him, the ego pride may make its appearance. He may become arrogant and demanding of society. It is an adolescent kind of pride, mixed with a peculiar feeling of insecurity because, deep within, he knows that the source of his power is external and that he may lose contact with it, rendering him empty. This is the main difference between the Aries and Leo prides, the latter is centered in the personality of Cancer and shouts to the world: I am! In Aries, the am is more important than the I. He feels proud for what is realized through him, for the great force at his service, and for the Yang (masculine) power within him. He is not particularly proud of who he is, for he is never quite sure of it.
Aries is the dawn of a personality as a conscious objective within human development. At dawn, the light of consciousness advances from the East, gradually illumining the realm of the Day while darkness is still present in the West before being forced to retreat under the horizon, in the realm of the Night, the subconscious. When a man wakes up, he is confronted by his dreams, memories of the psyche’s nocturnal state. The irrationality of those dreams remains in those waking moments. In a similar way, the Night Force is still evident in Aries and he relies on “ideas”, “reason”, and “logic”, the language of the conscious mind, in an almost devotional manner as witnesses of the triumph of the Day Force over the irrational ghosts of the Night.
The Night Force in Aries
However, if the Aries individual doesn’t stay exclusively in his conscious mind and ventures into his subconscious, he will likely find a source of the most prolific fantasies. The Night Force was strongest in Capricorn, where it formed the State, and it diminished from then on. In the next two signs, the need for forming a great “whole” acquired a spiritual meaning, beyond the physical and social. Aquarius is social idealism, reform and transformation under the influence of Uranus, and in Pisces the Night Force powers the “Triumphant Church”, “White Brotherhood” or “Saints Communion” symbolized by Neptune. In Aries, it reaches an even more transcendental meaning with its symbolism of the “sacrificial Lamb for humanity’s redemption”, in other words, martyrdom, where he may finally achieve in immortality the personality he so badly seeks.
The equilibrium between the conscious and subconscious mind is quite subtle in both Aries and Libra, the equinoctial signs. In Aries, the Day force gains in intensity as soon as the equinox passes and becomes the dominant energy, but one that must honor the past and the Night Force. In a way, Aries is compelled to sacrifice his past, perhaps burn it at the altar, and such sacrifice ought to be a serene and wonderful act. But the Night Force in his subconscious makes it feel as a truly dramatic gesture that provokes the self-compassion that is often observed in persons of the Aries type. It is the result of the decaying Night Force that is still attached to its preponderant domination and it is one of the negative Aries traits, along with doubts about the “utility” of it all and feeling the eternal “scapegoat” of destiny. They can only be overcome through the process of individuation, by which the conscious ego “assimilates the Unconscious contents”, using Carl Jung’s terminology.
Aries 19°
At the equinox, Aries 0°, consciousness is fighting its way out of a long and deep sleep, just like when we first register a conscious thought in the morning. The final victory of the Day Force won’t happen until its nineteenth degree, the oriental day of Resurrection. Later in Leo, the conscious ego will be fully realized in the joy of creative personal expression but in Aries 19° the Day Force is triumphant, the symbolic appearance of the first adolescent love. It is worth mentioning that in numerology, the number 19 is a profound number by combining 1, the number of new beginnings, with 9, the number of completion. The energy represented by 19 is unmistakable and can aid greatly in creating a new reality in one’s life.
Gift of Adaptability
Every act of living requires a release of energy to break through the inertia of the past. There are individuals whose main function is to initiate action, start cycles unfolding, and release the kind of power that enables new ideas and new plans to manifest in the consciousness of men. These individuals who can see and push ahead with Promethean vision and compassion belong to the Aries type. To such type, and to every person who feels within him (or her) surging the impetuosity and the initiative leadership which Aries symbolizes, Spirit offers a most precious gift: Adaptability. A fundamental gift because, to be successful, all new departures must be adapted to the conditions in which they occur, and to the purpose giving meaning to such initiatory act.
The ability to adapt is key to fulfill an organic existence or to achieve spiritual results. The latter implies that a vital need has been met, and no course of action may meet such a need without accounting for the conditions that gave rise to it. A plant or animal who does not adapt to its environment will face extinction, and a human being who does not fit to his surroundings, or significantly rebels against them, will head toward a physical, mental or moral breakdown. The power of adaptation ranges from the camouflage of many animals, notably the chameleon, to the social adage: “In Rome, do as the Romans do”. Even men who embody finer and wider responses to spiritual values, true occultists or mystics, usually seek to attract as little attention as possible, so as to be free to cultivate their uncommon psychological characteristics.
Spirit and Faith
To survive in a civilization, a man must either adapt to its conditions or else be able to bring forth a transforming “seed” that fulfills a need, at first subconscious, of his race, culture, or all of humanity. In this case, the individual acts as an instrumentality for Spirit. Recall that we use Spirit to mean the active outpouring of that which is wholeness and absolute equilibrium, the power seeking to reestablish harmony and functional balance wherever these may have been disturbed. It must act wherever there are wholes, which means everywhere. It brings together and integrates through an adequate structure the polarities that have drifted apart. Writes Rudhyar: “In its most deeply and vitally experienced aspect, Spirit is the answer to all human needs”.
Spirit is to be experienced always where the need is greatest, where the mind and the heart have experienced the torment of utmost emptiness. Nothing of the Spirit can happen to a man who does not believe in the possibility of happening. Quoting Rudhyar: “Faith alone can open the empty vase of personality to the influx of that which emanates from the absolute Fullness—this Fullness which man, failing to grasp its infinity, hides from his blinded vision under the many names of God”. Faith is like the act of conscious breathing. There is air all around us, so why expend the energy to draw it inward in the act of breathing? Because, in allowing its inrush to the lungs we enable our biological living, of course. In the same vein, there can be no spiritual life in integrity, in selfhood and in truth without acts of faith and deep psychic inhalation. To live in faith is to live in wholeness and harmony.
Final Thoughts
The Aries type is, above all, an individual who releases into acts (often in a spontaneous manner) instinctual impulses or spiritual ideas, as such he is not very good in the usual kind of adaptability. He predominantly exists in what he lets out of himself. He is not interested in keeping for himself any part of the energy, biological or spiritual, that he releases, and neither cares very much about the end results of the release. As we mention earlier, he lives in the fecundative act itself, rather than in or for the fruits of such act. He may seem selfish but he is not interested in accumulating benefits for himself, or to extract a price from those he contacts, it is simply that he is mostly interested in acting again and again for the sake of releasing “seed”, be that life-seed or spirit-seed. He may act selfishly to gain, retain or increase this ability to fecundate, but he will do as the releaser of some power that he cannot control nor cares to understand in most cases.
Such an attitude explains why the lack of adaptability may not be too important to the Aries individual who fecundates life unconsciously, he will have done his part and the rest will be up to “Life” or “God”. When the activity is conscious, however, adaptability is paramount, for there are precious few individuals who can act as releasers of new Spiritual Images. They must adapt to deliver their “seed” over socially acceptable channels, or at least causing the least friction, to protect the integrity of the delivered “seed”, for there is a fine line, and a balancing act, between adapting and compromising. The creative Aries type must constantly juggle to be understandable to those needing the spiritual arousal, yet not distort the message; to use the values born of the past, yet not sell short the future to the uncertain present; to be kind to men, yet true to Spirit.
Whereas his temperament stresses a direct release regardless of cost or results, he must realize that his activity must be rooted in compassion rather than in the sheer joy of creative release. He must learn to act not from some vaguely sensed spiritual source, but as Spirit in answer to a need, and the act must be adapted to the need. This means not only being adaptable in terms of the recipients or the spiritual vision but also to the relationship between the creator and his creative source, be that life or Spirit. He must learn to adapt his releases to the natural rhythm of biological and spiritual ebbs and flow, as well as to the character of the human need these releases strive to satisfy. Turning to humanity he will say: “Your need be filled”. And, bowing reverently and gratefully to the source whence comes all creative power, he will add: “Thy rhythm will lead me”.
Always Love. 🌹🙏💖
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