Part Two:
Twelve Phases of Human Experience
ARIES - Page 2 of 3

In Aries, personality is still not quite separated from the act. It is contained in the direct immediacy of an activity caused by an irrational power which, at one level, is "instinct" and at another "God." Action here is straightforward; yet because a sense of inner insecurity tends to bend down to the soil the adolescent shoot buffeted by social storms, this type of action needs often a prop. The Aries person has, however, to glorify this needed form of sustainment; to make it impersonal, so that his own personality be not weakened in the eyes of others — or in his own eyes. Indeed he knows, subconsciously if not consciously, what be lacks. He knows that his personality is hardly as yet a concrete fact; that it is only emerging from the subjective state. But this means also that it is as yet rooted in the immensities of the collective life, that it is filled with potency — filled with ιlan vital, with the surging and formative power of universal evolution . . . which many men have named God.
      In Aries, the "pulsing of life" — of the creative Breath — is felt. It passes through. It surges forth — and is gone. Aries power is the power of the lightning, which descends from above, which strikes out of the darkness of the Collective Unconscious. It is the power of revelation; power of Destiny released, which burns and fecundates. Such a power, from whatever level it operates in fiery downflows, gives to the actions of an Aries person a peculiar pioneering, impersonal, perhaps cosmic and fateful strength. Indeed, in and through the noblest expressions of Aries power it is not an individual person who is at work, but humanity — Man. At less exalted levels, a social or religious group, a nation, a race may voice their needs and state the solutions to these needs through such a person — who is not quite a conscious personality and yet much more than an individual.
      As such a person senses the meaning of the destiny which through him is becoming act, pride may roar through his ego. He may become arrogant. He may make demands upon society, as if all kinds of privileges were his "by divine right."' Yet, more often than not, his pride is rather adolescent, mixed with humility and a peculiar feeling of insecurity; for he knows inwardly that he does not own the source of the pride — giving power, that he might lose the contact — and become empty. This differentiates the Aries pride from that typical of Leo; for in Leo, pride is centered in personality and rooted in a glory-seeking "I am." The Aries person will stress the "am" rather than the "I." His pride is in what he does, in what is done through him, in that great force which is at his command, in the powerful masculinity of his organism. It is not essentially in what he personally is; for he is never quite sure of what he is.
      Aries is the dawn of personality as an objective and conscious fact in the cycle of human unfoldment. In that dawn the light of consciousness gradually sweeps through the Eastern sky, awakening all forces which belong to the realm of the Day. But there is still darkness in the West. The power of the Night is still holding sway over vast regions of the human psyche. Henceforth it will control the memory and gain possession of the regions below-the-horizon. These regions constitute the Unconscious.
      As a man awakens, he meets his dreams — the twilight memory of the Night-state of the psyche. Their irrationality haunts his awakenings. And because the pull of the Night-force is still strong and insistent, the Aries person clings with dogmatic or devotional intensity to "ideas," to "reason" and "logic." These are witnesses to the triumph of the Day-force over the irrational phantasms of the realm of Night. They are the bulwarks of form and consistency over chaos and pre-natal fears. But if the Aries person lets go of the conscious and withdraws inwardly, be finds himself well-nigh flooded with the prolific fantasy of his unconscious.