Aries 15° (April 4)

It’s Easter though you’d barely know it. We drove to Dartmouth and back and made some pizza with caramelized onion and goat cheese. It was pretty damn good I must say. Fun foods these past few days. I should really be getting into a rhythm these next few days—it’s sort of my last chance. I will take it. I’m not feeling all that much a part of any community right now I must say. Very much not. In some ways I’ve been in the same place for weeks and I really do need to be careful of that sort of thing. I am very much tonight looking forward to moving through and doing my damnest. I believe it to be all any of us can do. I will keep reading and putting things in play, and playing them forward, while I must begin to superprioritize diet and exorcise as a larger part of my daily ritual. Sometimes I just sit up here in my office watching the hours tick by, not inspired to do the work and hand but needing to make myself available just in case something pops out.

A literary character whose storyline expresses Aries spiritual bent and journeying is Larry Darrell, the protagonist of Somerset Maughm’s The Razor’s Edge, the title of which draws inspiration from the Upanishad’s, a snippet of which appears in the book’s epigraph: The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to salvation is hard. To view life as an experience that will cut you doesn’t take a leap of Aries’s understanding. Wounded and traumatized by war and death of a brother soldier, Darrell (from the Norman-French d’Airelle—there was once such a place in France, while airelle means huckleberry, which may be a nod from Maughm to Mark Twain), returns home to his native, American midwestern town, friends and fiancé, Isabel, only to find the gross materialism of that society insupportable; so he hightails it back to Europe and ultimately sets off on a spiritual quest that includes time in a Benedictine monastery before ending up in India, becoming immersed in the Hindu philosophy of Advaita Vedanta (meaning non-duality—that Adam mindset!) ultimately achieving enlightenment escaping the cycle of birth and death. As you do. The point being Aries would readily do likewise if he could. Meanwhile, we get a glimpse into the Aries soul in that he is, on the whole, that non-materialist, wounded warrior who finds the conspicuous consumption of convention anathema to his being. He yearns for meaning and to escape society’s hamster wheels if not the giant karmic one of reincarnation. As a son of Mars, life for Aries is a war, this metaphor for existence making up the whole of the Bhagavad Gita; like Darrell and Tony Stark, there comes a time where Aries feels himself wounded, afflicted by the horrors of this war of life, but perhaps also having to confront his own animal nature in the fight for survival, kill or be killed. As a footnote: Isabel, whom he urges to join him, cannot give up all the pricey stuff of life and thus marries a shallow millionaire; Darrell marries their childhood friend Sophie, who has become an alcoholic and opium addict after the death of her first husband and child from a car accident. Archetypally, Sophie (meaning: wisdom) is just the kind of damsel in distress that the Aries knight seeks to rescue—Isabel in effect kills Sophie by bringing her Zubrówka, a flavored vodka, most notably, with a blade of bison grass in every bottle, to which the fragilely sober Sophie succumbs. She doesn’t make it over that particular edge—or perhaps she does, depending on your view of salvation. 

I am now in my seventh year of writing this Blague. Year six, I went through the first five years, and excerpted from five Blagues per day, as a way of taking inventory of what came before. If there are any blocks of text following this paragraph that would be from the corresponding day last, the sixth, year.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree point of the Sabian Symbol may at times be one degree higher than the one listed here. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. 

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go! Copyright 2021 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved. Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2021 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox.