Aries 11°

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

Some more excerpting:

The first astrological house, as an umbrella covering a number of related attributes, is still most often distinguished as the house of Self. This speaks volumes. So many enclaves of society, not to mention those organized religions, though they entertain the notion of selfhood, regard it as something that must obey and conform to the collective in its myriad manifestations. The pitfalls of selfishness are forever being pointed out, while missing the point entirely: That true selfishness is actually the most selfless of acts. The more independent we are the less we need rely on others, self-concern, even a surplus of it, staving off pesky imposition on our fellow earthlings. This is a good example, incidentally, of the brand of singularity-thinking that we all must get our brains around in courting the 1st Cosmic Energy—that is, that some thing or notion and its opposite are essentially the same, more than paradoxically, one. Let’s take this astrological first-house concept of selfhood a wee bit further.

Think of Adam and—we won’t say Eve, but rather Adam’s first wife—Lilith. (Yes, Eve was wifey mach two, as shall be revealed in her archetypal influence over the 2nd Cosmic Energy, detailed in the next chapter). Adam, as we know, had total carte blanche. White (blanche) symbolizes both a clean slate and essential goodness. Along with red, for blood, it is the color associated with the 1st energy and Aries. Its planet, Mars, rules the blood, which, of course, is made up of white and red cells. The name Adam (Adamah) actually means bloody clay. The stuff of which we creatures are made. The 1st Cosmic Energy is focused on what is, both literally and figuratively, in our blood. It is concerned with our essential, primal selves. It seeks to fully form and fortify us in the face of the infinite influences. Those that can cause us to forget who we are, unadulterated and unabridged, and what we truly want, without extraneous voices in our heads. And as we grow in life, this energy powers our ability to continually wipe the slate clean of all such externals, so that we can always know our own mind. The 1st Cosmic Energy sees who we are and what we want as one and the same.

Adam, our model-A man, imposed his will freely. He was empowered to name all he surveyed. Doing so is an act of creation, logos (not Grease) being “the word.” Life was what he made it, or, more accurately, how he called it, without any concern for conflicting ideas or derision. Adam, alone, comes up against no obstacles. Likewise Lilith. They cannot stay together because they each need that carte blanche. Essentially, so do we all. Genesis, the opening chapter of the proverbial good book in which Adam appears, is, like the first house of the zodiac, a mirroring of the first chapter of every individual’s life. And whether you are a closed book or an open one, this must remain the beginning of your story—intact, to revisit again and again. Or else, as many of us can sadly attest to doing, we all too easily lose the rest of the plot. The Arien first house is associated with the age-span of human life from birth to age seven. This a time when we are the subject of every sentence as yet unstrung together in our own minds. Everything else, including other people, are objects for our own use, pleasure, comfort and other innumerable purposes that fall under the heading of our own survival. Thriving is our singular aim. What we often fail to realize as we “grow” is that this should remain the case. It seems that, while we do need to negotiate other aspects of life, neatly catalogued by the ensuing eleven energies, we tend to lose our grasp on this premier one. Cosmically, you might say, so many of us all too easily throw our selves under the bus as a result of others’, and life’s, demands of us. The upshot being that none of the subsequent eleven cosmic energies can properly take hold in our life unless we maintain our connection with this primary force. Think of the 1st Cosmic Energy as the hard drive of our being upon which all the other energies, like so many software programs, run.

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