The Challenges of Living with Aries and the Warrior Archetype
One of the difficulties of working with archetypes is that they have the tendency to get stuck in time without anyone realizing it.
The Warrior, for example, is an archetype that seems pretty easy to understand: A warrior is someone who fights, right?
But where in the modern world do you find the Warrior?
The army? I’ve had occasion to know people who’ve worked for the army, and I’ve never known a less Warrior-like bunch of engineers.
Jump from that to an happy hour in Silicon Valley, though, and a Warrior-archetype channeling CEO might take off your head with a business card.
In many ways, our understanding of the Warrior is rooted in a society that no longer exists. We can recognize the Warrior when that archetype is being channeled by a fantasy warrior like Arya Stark or Aragorn, but, when most most representations of an archetype appear in historical fiction or fantasy, we are left completely unequipped to recognize that archetype when it appears in the real world.
This is a problem for people with strong Aries and Mars signatures in their natal charts, who really should be working with that archetype.
Where is the Warrior in the Modern World?
So, what does the Warrior look like in the modern world? The Warrior is our inner guardian. It is the part of us that is always looking out for us. Its job is to be vigilant and perform constant threat-assessments. The Warrior knows when a boundary has been crossed, and it does what it can to make that boundary crossing stop.
In society, a person who carries around the Warrior archetype performs this service for everyone. They are the person who steps forward when someone is threatening another person on a train. They are the person who speaks up and fights back when a minority’s boundaries are disrespected or the innocent are under attack.
In a society with a strong emphasis on peace and civility, the Warrior might be hard to see. You might encounter the Warrior at a worker at a grocery store dashing across the parking lot to catch a cart that is about to roll into a car. You might see the Warrior a kickboxing class or doing CrossFit training. The Warrior might call you out when you’re wrong on the Internet, or try really aggressively to get you to buy their book.
The Trouble With Being a Warrior
For a person who carries a lot of Warrior energy, living in a society that doesn’t recognize the warrior can be difficult. In a Warrior society, this social role is recognized, and—ideally—people who carry this energy are given help learning how to carry this energy in a healthy way. Then, when they’re done learning, they get some kind of right of passage that recognizes their role in society. They might be allowed to carry a sword, for instance, or wear wear armor or identifying clothes.
Many societies in the modern world don’t support people carrying the Warrior archetype unless you join a formal governmental body such as the armed forces or police force. Not all Warriors are equipped for a life of order and discipline that being a member of those organizations requires, and when someone who is not a member of those organizations steps up to defend themselves or others—even if it’s in a healthy and respectful way—they run the risk of being invalidated.
How many Warrior people have heard someone say, “What right do you have to fight back about this?” or “Can’t you just leave it for someone else to handle?”
When you are carrying the Warrior archetype, you know in your core that you need to step up and speak, but how do you communicate something you know inside when you don’t have evidence of it in the outside world?
In a Warrior society, going through life continually equipped for battle is expected and supported. It is assumed that a lot of people are carrying around a lot of stress all the time, and there are ways of blowing off steam built into the society. Everyone retires to the hall at night to drink ale, for instance, or there are opportunities to spar in a way that gives the drive to compete a healthy outlet.
In a society that prefers to believe it’s at peace, there might be places you can go to blow off steam, but these places are on the fringes of society in the same way that Veterans Day is just a free day off (if employers give the day off at all) for most people in the United States. If you aren’t into fitness or martial arts, finding an opportunity to express the Warrior can be difficult.
Embracing the Warrior Means Learning Courage
In a Warrior society, courage is learned on the battlefield, but in a society that wants to believe it’s at peace all the time, courage is a lesson that is most often learned in the darkness of your own soul.
Courage is knowing who you are. It’s embracing the Warrior in yourself, even when society doesn’t recognize it. Courage is creating your own warrior code when society doesn’t give you one and standing by it even when it doesn’t get support. Courage is defending your boundaries even when the people around you say it’s no big deal, and you should let it go. Courage is going through the day knowing that you might be the person who stands between justice and injustice and makes sure justice wins. Courage is knowing that in order to be an effective Warrior, you have to be prepared for a fight, and attending to your psychic defenses even when no one else sees a threat.
Working With the Warrior Archetype When You’re not a Warrior
There are some people who carry more of the Warrior archetype than others. They might have a lot of Aries planets or a prominent Mars in their astrology chart. They might have been brought up to embody this archetype by a Warrior family.
But each of us carries a little bit of the Warrior somewhere, and so we do ourselves a disservice when we deny the Warrior exists. When there are people in our lives who carry the Warrior in a way they can’t deny, denying our own inner Warrior denies them the opportunity to feel like there are others who understand them in the world.
The best thing we can do for the Warriors in our lives is to embrace this part of ourselves, even if it’s not something we express very often. The Warrior turns violent when it’s forced into the shadows. That violence might be turned against others, but it’s just as likely to be turned against the Warrior themselves, often out of a sense of guilt for carrying around the heavy burden of a misunderstood archetype.
15 Healthy Ways to Express the Warrior
Engage in debate (consensually!) with someone else.
Tell the truth when it scares you.
Play a competitive video game.
Do an exercise routine that gets your heart rate up while listening to aggressive music.
Write about an injustice you feel passionately about.
Volunteer at a soup kitchen or do something about another injustice that infuriates you.
Bumper cars.
Memorize a slam poem and perform it loudly during your commute.
Ward your home.
Magickally bind an abuser.
Join the Society for Creative Anachronism.
Reach out to a Warrior god(dess) such as the Morrigan, Sekhmet, Chiyou, Ares, Athena, Shiva, Odin, or Thor.
Write a letter to your political representative about an issue you’re passionate about.
Pick up trash on the beach.
Perfect your warrior pose.
A version of this article was originally posted on Tumblr.
