It Takes All Sorts, So Why the Martial Emphasis?
A while ago I was asked to talk about astrology to some teenagers at the Museum of the History of Science here in Oxford. For a bit of fun, I asked them each to fill out a short questionnaire. They were to choose three words to describe themselves from a list of different character traits.
Naturally, these were all traits that are traditionally associated with specific Sun signs with the usual overlaps. So for example, they could choose artistic, generous, kind, intelligent, sensitive…
The top two adjectives they chose to describe themselves: competitive and aggressive. And weirdly, nearly all of them chose these as their top two words.
Why did they all think they were Aries – or at least Aries-style? As a generation, these kids were born with Pluto in Sagittarius, Uranus in Aquarius and Neptune in Capricorn. You could argue that with that Neptune they would be likely to make ambition a fashion, but I don’t think the answer lies just in the generational astrology.
They seemed pretty docile and well-behaved to me; in fact, if anything, rather conformist, which would fit with the combination of Uranus in group-oriented Aquarius, and Neptune in straight-laced Capricorn. I could only assume that somewhere along the line, these kids had learned (or been taught) that being like an Aries was the thing. Not in so many words, obviously.
Then I watched The Apprentice recently, and there were some more kids saying how aggressive and competitive they were… again like it’s a good thing.
In astrology, these are the qualities of Mars and Aries. Qualities that are useful in a warrior, an athlete or a salesperson – but worrying in some other contexts, for example, your bank manager. Would you prefer the person looking after your money to be competitive or strategic? Instinctive or calculating?
One thing astrology teaches us is that we need all kinds of people with all kinds of qualities to run a society successfully. When one set of characteristics becomes too dominant, or as sociologists might put it overly valorised, things stop functioning so well. Instead of keeping that martial energy where it should be – in the sports arena or the army or the sales department – we’ve allowed it to dominate other parts of our lives – the financial sector, reality TV.
Back in the noughties, Suzanne Collins was channel surfing between images of the invasion of Iraq and reality TV games. The two came together in her very fertile imagination and she wrote The Hunger Games, which is among other things, a critique of the purely Martial approach to life. The story she tells is set in the future, but it has a moral for our times. Collins Mars is, naturally, in the storyteller’s sign Gemini, allegedly in detriment, but in her case used with cutting intelligence.
With the stamp of the Olympics being pressed firmly into our socio/cultural psyche, is it any wonder those kids highly impressionable young radar system has imprinted the Aries vibe as cool and aspirational?
Wish I’d been able to got that one. She is phenomenal.
I have a Dr Who style image of everyone sitting around watching TV with the light literally being sucked into the screen.
Saw Bernadette Brady couple of weeks ago at a workshop and she said that celebrities ‘hold’ our Solar energies and she included star athletes and team sportspersons as solar, and in our youth we pass on our solar energy to others as we are just learning about it in a way.
And what’s weird about that is that at the same time quite a lot of them have little or no sports at school. So the competitive drive is diverted.
I think it might have a lot to do with the ongoing Americanisation of society, where people are taught from school age that if you ain’t number one, you’re a loser (and curiously, that idea has continued in recent years, in parallel with the ’empowering’ PC idea, also being imposed through the education system, that everyone should get a prize, so as not to traumatise the hopeless kid who always comes last).
I also imagine that the Aries ‘winner’ mentality will become even more prevalent among the young, what with the shortage of jobs.
Now here’s something sick – there was a reality show (I think in Germany) where four homeless people were taken off the streets, made to do different tests (no doubt humiliating), and the winner won – a job and a flat! JG Ballard would have loved it.
Sadly, if you’re always doing and aspiring, in addition to the daily onslaught of information, there’s precious little time to stop and think, and that suits those in power just fine.
Nooooo –
Then there’s the idiotic exam system – sigh – which means our children are trained to pass exams not learn how to think.
Is this all something to do with producing perfect consumers who will always go on to the next object, seminar, dish to be consumed – and who can never be satisfied?
This just makes me shudder. Winning at all costs makes losers of all IMO. As a Libra, I say leave the Aries “winner” mentality to Aries and let the rest of us find what suits us.
Quite.
As an Aries and an American, there are several responses I could have had, but I’m a 12th house Aries and an American who grew up (with Christina) abroad, so my responses aren’t quite typical.
I’ve always been rather appalled by Europe’s fascination with American culture, especially the administrative tendency to pick up patterns in education and business which America discarded after 10 years because it clearly wasn’t working. From the North American continent, reeling under an economic depression that nobody will quite acknowledge the depth of, staggering under the knockon effects of educational policies that kneecap our hopes of a viable future, Europe seems to come a lot closer to getting it right — riots and all. I mean, at least your riots get televised. We have to film ours on our phones and hope they go viral. Don’t follow America. We are not going anywhere useful these days.
The focus on Aries as martial and competitive has always seemed rather shallow to me, if y’all don’t mind my saying so. It’s been said that there are “lamb” and “ram” Aries. What all Aries share is:
– initiative. We will step in where angels fear to tread because somebody might as well, and how will we learn the real scope of the trouble if nobody goes and discovers it? If you won’t, then stop blocking the entrance!
– physicality. This feeds the martial impulse, obviously, but it also feeds the impulse to work and play.
– economy. We don’t have much patience with resistance, because it wastes energy and time. When something we’ve started would be better served by someone else or by being dropped, we don’t like to stick around and waste our time or others’ resources. This is often taken to be “difficulty completing”, but that’s a misreading. We know, often subconsciously, that we need to let go and move on as soon as the disharmony or wasted effort starts to show, but it takes awhile for others to catch up to that fact. Aries think and assess very quickly, often subconsciously, which is why our thinking isn’t always available in words.
This martial/competitive shit we’re all getting rubbed in our faces is part of the second-chakra appetite-and-jingoism meme that’s being put in place to simplify control of increasingly large, and increasingly poor, populations. Next step: a more obvious effort at creating social schisms, to further divide & conquer. Be interesting to see what messages about race, class and Occupy come out next.
Everything you say about Aries is true. I don’t think anyone’s saying that Aries are all competitive meatheads though. But being competitive is an Arien trait. So by the same token not all Pisces are drunken liars but being a drunk and lying are Piscean qualities. See what I mean.
The point is that we need all the best qualities of the signs in balance to have a good society – and at the moment we don’t.
I got a TV last year after 10 years without. I still can’t believe the adversarial nature of the majority of the programmes – it’s horrifying, and seems to have become perfectly acceptable. And it’s not even just healthy competition anymore, it’s deliberately setting people up to behave in the lowest, sneakiest, rudest ways to provide ‘entertainment’.
I really do worry about kids watching this kind of thing and thinking it’s normal, and wonder if this is what you were encountering. Come out on top at all costs, no matter what the situation.
Snap, Opal. We still only have iPlayer but that’s quite enough. TV is not real life, of course, but it’s modelling something really rotten. It’s like a ghastly mirror that picks out all the blemishes and magnifies them and diminishes all the pretty stuff.
Christina, your elucidation is perfect, as ever 🙂 thanks.
My stepmom is a huge fan of the original 1970’s tv show, Charlie’s Angels. We used to consider that the most appalling & misogynist fluff, but viewing it now, it’s edgy, intelligent, and extraordinarily empowering — even if they do dress awfully nicely for hand-to-hand combat.
Tv has come so far down it’s dizzying. And I absolutely agree that it does affect people.
Ha ha – you’re right. The only problem I really have with Charlie’s Angels is Charlie. My favourite was Kate Smith.