Aries remembers birth, emerging clothed in bloody viscera, in the seat of compulsion and pleasure/pain. Aries never gets over it and a marked ambivalence toward the Mother runs through the biography of the Ram.
The amniotic sac (gr. amnos, lamb) and the blood-laden placenta. Aries never fully recovers from the trauma of birth. They oscillate between the exhilaration of freedom and the unfairness of having no choice but to BE. They never give up their first lover/enemy, the Mother. The personal history of Aries often contains a flamboyancy in the mother-figuration, an dramatic engagement they can't pass up or let go of.
Aries tells us about beginnings: at the beginning of the modern mind Aries speaks through two philosophers, the contemporaneous Descartes (March 31, 1596 - 1650) and Hobbes ( April 5, 1588 - 1679). Philosophical argument deplores the ad hominem, but astrology adores it: both Descartes and Hobbes endured particularly vivid birth circumstances. Descartes, with cogito ergo sum, objectified the concept of the Self we continue to use and question. He experienced a complicated and politically dense infancy. Briefly, he lied about it; philosophers are not supposed to lie.
As for Hobbes, inventor of the rational materialist politics of power, his reputation rolls on the wheels of a few Arietic formulations, ("clear and distinct" as Descartes said thoughts should be) the "warre of each against all", "nasty, brutish, and short". His birth took place during the bombardment of the English coast by the Spanish Armada. "His mother fell in labor with him upon the fright of the invasion of the Spaniards," Aubrey's Brief Lives puts it. A bachelor, Hobbes had no offspring but left an autobiography. He attributed his lifelong anxiety to his delivery: "And hereupon it was my Mother Dear/Did bring forth Twins at once, both Me, and Fear."
Additional reading:
Bordo, Susan. Ed. Feminist Interpretations of Descartes (1999)
Hoffman, Piotr. The Quest for Power: Hobbes, Descartes, and the emergence of modernity (1996)
http://soysauced.blogspot.com/2008/10/marlon-brando-was-redhead.html
Sunday, April 5, 2009 at 01:49PM 
