Aries 6°

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree: click here)

As I walked around this frigid Spring day, after so mild a winter and the early appearance of pretty pink and white tree blossoms, now dead with frost, it reminded me of my aborted start to this year’s daily Blague in which I am behind by about ten days. And I thought perhaps it wasn’t just a modern human failing to start something and then immediately exhibit no follow through—or perhaps to start something prematurely, not determined to finish or not gauging the “climate” of one’s own life correctly. In other words, those dead blossoms on frozen tree limbs reminded me of my own failed attempt at a new Spring ritual, similar to, but not the same as, last year’s.

Ironic (said word’s coincidental kinship to the element or iron, ruled by Aries planet Mars, not withstanding) that Aries is the sign of ignition, impetus, impulse, new beginnings, befitting the sign’s own start with the first moment of Spring, each year, on the equinox; because, the fact is, it doesn’t always have stamina to follow through; or it might be so rash that it leaps before it looks and then must take two steps back for its one. This is what is read by the cosmic energy, personified in the war god Mars, brashly running onto battlefields wherein he gets wounded and sent off howling. And yet we need his sense of iniative and his hussle; we just need to harness it, as does his war-goddess, sister, Athena, who is always playing the end game, and to win. She invented the harnass and the bridle both, symbolic of an ability to sustain and steer and strategize, as she does, with here steely eyes and demeanor. She is also the goddess of crafts and all things artisinal—things that require a design and determination—to be steely is to be undistracted, eye on the prize or finished product. But again, there are extenuating circumstances, if not for Athena, then for the rest of us and those poor frozen blossoms.

The image of an early blossom, warmed by promise, burned by the cold, dead on the vine, to me, is like the opposite of withering on one. When we say one is whithering on the vine that is a metaphor for the fact that they mightn’t have made a love match and are now past the usual age, their bloom of youth has gone, they have failed to bear fruit, etc. This being the opposite, an early bloom, blasted by a freeze, rashly venturing forward to be burned by frost would thus carry the opposite metaphoric meaning: One who might have entered into love or lust too early and have paid the price of some form of damage for doing so. As someone who has never withered anywhere, the latter metaphor is more up my alley, so to speak. Rash moves in life are more the more ruinous when we not only haven’t thought them through but we don’t have the wherewithall to do so. If the god Mars/Aries is the spark interpretation of cardinal-fire, then he isn’t much concerned with the follow through—though Aries men might be sexually specific I don’t think they have the staying power of some other signs, although their refractory periods can be almost instantaneous. Lest we forget that Warren Beatty scheduled multiple lovers in one night, this surely wasn’t a recipe for any one of them, perhaps, experiencing multiple orgasms. Unlike sparky Mars, his sister Athena more embodies the metaphoric personification of a polite light, another interpretation of cardinal-fire. It’s there, but you might not see it behind the steely exterior of the stove or one’s eyes. But it’s all the while burning and ready to fuel this or that.

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