Aries in the Wild: Living in the Shadow of Civilization

While Mars has been in Scorpio, I've found myself drawn to movies with a certain theme: Call of the Wild, Last of the Mohicans, Legends of the Fall, Antlers, Happy People... All of these stories about the wilderness and the people who live in it and the reasons they choose to live there.

For weeks, I have struggled to articulate what it is about these stories that has drawn me. I have no desire to be kidnapped or fight a bear or ride in a dogsled in the snow. The landscapes in those films are, of course, beautiful, but I don't just want a nice view.

It isn't enough for me to just see mountains. When I see them, I want to be in them. I want to walk into the dark forest and become a creature of that habitat. It is so easy to envision myself taking that first step and transforming into a creature as wild as a deer, never returning to civilization again except as an outsider.

And yet, I know, if I were to walk into those woods, I wouldn't find what I desire. I have stood on the top of mountains after hiking a full day through those wild woods and felt the same deep heart-longing for the wilderness. As soon as I am actually in the woods, I always find that the woods themselves have nothing to do with my desire at all.

The wilderness, and the movies set in wild places, only hold up a mirror to something wild inside me.

I saw the reflection of that same wild thing while reading The Book of Fire by Steven Forrest. Describing what he calls the Aries family (Mars, Aries, and the 1st house), he says:

"With the Aries family, we encountered the same primal--even primeval--dimensions of this life-giving function: our ability to defend ourselves and protect those we love. We looked at our ability to satisfy our necessary appetites, to claim territory, to defend boundaries, and to make a space for ourselves in a universe that might sometimes stand against us."

One of the classic descriptions of the Aries/Libra polarity is the self vs. society.

The right to defend yourself and your property is a basic right of living things, a right we hand over to the state when we live in civilization. Building societies that create peace through cooperation and the passive-aggressive threat of potential violence (that, hopefully, never needs to be acted on) is Libra in action.

Even when the state does an adequate job of providing for the basic needs of defense, however, the Aries family (using Steven Forrest's term) doesn't sleep quietly.

Recently, one of my patrons, Stell, introduced me to a series of essays on a blog called "The Baliocene Doctrine." In the essays, the author addresses the problem of why, in a time when most humans are safer and better taken care of in any time in history, everyone feels so insecure.

(The essays were written in 2017, so we can argue that many people today do not feel safe and well cared for, but I believe the point stands that there are many people who feel fundamentally insecure who are living lives kings would have envied two hundred years ago.)

The author argues that humanity has been living in survival mode until very recently. Now that many of us are no longer in that place, new needs are bubbling to the surface that society is not equipped to provide for.

As one climbs Maslow's pyramid out of the level of basic needs, new needs for identity formation and validation make themselves heard as strongly as basic survival needs in crisis situations. Humans who have escaped crisis-mode need help developing personal myths around which to form an identity, and they need validation of those personal myths from the people around them.

The essays are excellent. I particularly recommend Am I Truly Mardukth? In astrology, the needs the author is describing are called Leo (the need for identity validation) and Sagittarius (the need for a personal narrative that gives life meaning). Meeting these needs is necessary to ensure the individual feels fully alive and doesn't get lost in the machine of civilization.

And, also, I would argue that validation and meaning aren't enough.

There is something wild in us that never climbed down from the trees, an inner cryptid that lives by the law of tooth and claw. It is the shadow of civilization, the part of us that must be sacrificed for peace. Like all shadows, it reasserts itself in ways we don't approve of when we turn our backs and refuse to acknowledge it.

This wild thing in us needs a space that is "mine" not just "ours," the ability to enforce the boundaries around things that are "mine," and the satisfaction of meeting basic needs for food and shelter "for myself."

As we continue to move through an age where, increasingly, humans need not apply, it is important that we not forget the Aries family and the human needs it represents.