Aries Season
Included in this post is:
A reminder and invitation to send some Birthday Love to our Aries beloveds
Aries & the Myth of the Golden Fleece (part 1) & contemplation questions
Stepping in from a place of radical immediacy, innocence & invincibility of Love
sprouting acorn ❤️🔥
The Sun in Aries
The Sun exalts in Aries. They are uplifted (with honor, praise, resource, and/or expectation) to do their job well — which is to be, to exist, to take up space, to express their individuality, to cohere a sense of self.
But it can also feel lonely there. There’s a sense of separation in cohering that “I”. Aries people (and aspects of Self) can find it challenging to comprehend that they’ve got a whole team of human, plant, animal, ancestral, celestial allies behind them. So reach out and let your Aries friends know you’re on their team and that you cherish them this birthday season
Every time an Aries individual steps in whole-heartedly and gets to shine … they create more space for the rest of us to do the same.
Gift your favorite Aries an astrology reading that helps them to shine in ways that feel more authentic, embodied and creatively empowered as they begin a new journey around the Sun.
Aries in Myth: The Golden-fleeced Ram (part 1)
The legendary Golden Ram that’s associated with the constellation of Aries, was born of Poseidon (our astrological Neptune) and Theophany, a princess whose name means “appearance or manifestation (phany) of the gods (theos)”.
Poseidon turned Theophany into a ewe in order to disguise and hide her from her many other suitors and then also took the shape of a ram himself. The mating of the two — the formless (Neptune) & the play of the gods in form (Theophany) — led to the birth of Chrysomallus, a winged ram of golden fleece (1, 2). This divine creature plays a key role in saving the lives of two children, Helle and Phrixos.
Helle and Phrixus were the mortal princess and prince, twins of King Athamas and the cloud nymph Nephele. But because they were due to inherit the throne, their stepmother Ino becomes jealous of the children and comes up with a plot to basically get rid of them. Ino secretly burns the crop seeds causing a famine in the kingdom, and then she tells the king to ask the Delphic Oracle what to do. He agrees to do this … however, Ino is the one who sends the messenger. She privately instructs the messenger to relay that the twins must be sacrificed to the gods in order to recover the fields’ productivity. Eventually King Athamas agrees, and just as they are about to sacrifice Phrixus, their mother Nephele sends the golden ram Chrysomallus to pick them up and carry them away.
However, on their way to safety, Helle falls from the back of the ram into the sea. According to some tales, she drowns and in others Poseidon saves her. The sea Hellespontos is named after her.
Phrixus makes it to Colchis, where he is received warmly by King Aeëtes, the son of the sun god Helios. They sacrifice the ram to Poseidon. But then a prophesy is made that the King must keep the fleece otherwise he’ll lose his throne and kingdom. So now, seeing outsiders as a threat and potentially coming to take the fleece away from him, Aeëtes establishes a policy of killing strangers coming to the kingdom and the golden fleece is hung on a tree in the holy grove of Ares (our astrological Mars) where it is guarded by a dragon who never sleeps.
Reflection Questions
Imagine you’re playing the stepmother Ino in your life. Are you tempted to sacrifice something innocent, in order to gain belonging or security?
Imagine you’re playing the role of King Athamas in your life. Is there something you’re being asked to sacrifice in order to restore the fertility or producticity of your fields? Where did this message/idea come from? Do you trust the messenger?
Who are Helle and Phrixus to you? And who is King Aeëtes to you — at this moment?
What do you want to ask the characters of this story? What does Nephele know? What happens to Helle when she falls into the sea? What does Phrixus experience when he arrives safely to land? What is the perspective of the burnt crop seeds?
What do the characters of the story want you to know? What is missing from their story or perspective that they want you to hear at this moment? Does this perspective cause any shifts in how the Dream is playing in your own life?
References
Aries in Myth & Psyche Webinar, Jason Holley.
Stepping in from a place of radical immediacy & innocence
Notes on Mercury Retrograde in Aries & Jupiter in Gemini
In Aries, we find the newborn’s instinct to cry out for help, attention and nourishment. As babies, we make this cry from a place of radical immediacy and innocence. But as we grow up, the pure spirit of trust that propels such a call out to a benevolent presence that we expect to be there for us — that propels such unabashed, unfiltered Self-expression — can be lost in translation through the filters of the conditioned personality. It can feel swamped by productivity and performance expectations, the need to prove our worthiness to receive what we long for, and a felt-sense of danger, hopelessness or insurmountable odds. When we find ourselves as adults in situations where asking for help, sounding a call or making some bright, bold, assertive expression of Self-energy would be a natural response, it’s often imaginally constricted by the thinking mind’s calculations and analysis of how to do it.
Which makes sense. Life’s a lot more complicated as adults than it was as infants. And yet, the place of Aries still exists in all of us regardless of age — and Aries is not calculated or premeditated.
In this time of the Sun (and soon Neptune and Saturn) in Aries, how can we honor the innate intelligence of the sign, its radical immediacy and innocence? Especially when we might be finding ourselves in a place of existential anxiety around knowing what we like, what we want, what we’re ‘going after’ and how to possibly ‘get there’?
When we don’t tell Aries planets to “use your words…” and to first think about what it’s like for the other person, but instead allow, support and resource Aries planets to speak in their own embodied languages, they can show us what they know from their perspective. They can tell us about our soul desires, our place, our innate belonging and interconnectedness, by giving us a taste of what it feels like to have those desires fulfilled, through the arc and sensation of the action itself — through getting in there, stepping into the unknown and learning about Love through experience.
So, if you’re feeling an invitation or if you’re seeing an opening to “get in there” or to “get on the field” even if you don’t know how it’s going to go … just begin. You’ll get to learn what you’re capable of along the way as the various inner creatures that are associated with the endeavor, start to feel that space is being created for them, start warming up, start moving within you and revealing to you their resources, intelligences and life force. There’s resilience in multiplicity. And stepping out into something new, stimulates more of our multiplicity and inter-connections — both inner and outer.
This Aries season, don’t underestimate the revitalizing power of activities that may not promise a “Product”, “Solution” or neat “Answer”, but that do invite more aspects of yourself to spontaneously express (and make space for more eros to flow through your body) whether it’s through ecstatic dance, whole-hearted singing, praying out loud in front of others, communal art-making that makes space for the mayhem, mess and magic …
Step into the unknown where surprises are more possible — especially for the parts of ourselves that really feel like they know and see it all.
one of Spring’s first buttercups near our home in the Sierra Nevada foothills
here’s to going all in ….
Nicole
