Neptune in the Temple of the Ram — Was Jesus an Aries?

Hey, everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology [https://nightlightastrology.com/]. Today, we're going to continue our exploration of the mythology and archetypal symbolism of the sign of Aries by exploring the reasons that some astrologers have had over many years of associating the sign of Aries with the death and resurrection story, which, of course, happens around the Easter holiday, that kind of intersects with the Aries season and so forth.

But we are going to explore the correlations between the sign of Aries and the mythology of the death and resurrection motif in the Christian story. Now I hope that if you're listening to this, if you're a person of the Christian faith, that you'll find this interesting and supportive of your own, you know, your own faith journey, but for people who are not a Christian, that you'll find mythological and archetypal value in this exploration.

I think Neptune, especially in the sign of Aries, has the power to evoke some core Christian mythology. That doesn't necessarily mean that Neptune in Aries is a Christian transit, right? But it has, there's some rhyming that Neptune in Aries does with the Christian mythology, or there's some ways in which it can evoke that symbolism that I think is very powerful and an interesting thing to consider as again, we have so many transits coming up in this sign, so that's what we'll do today.

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So anyway, now on to just a little reminder, if you if you don't, I'm sure most of you don't need one, but let's pull up the real-time clock and just refresh on why we are going to talk about Aries yet again. It's I like to do kind of a deep focus series of meditations on the archetypes of a sign when an outer planet is entering a sign.

You who follow my channel know that I did this for Aquarius. I'll be doing this for Gemini later, when Uranus is approaching in June. I did this for Taurus when Uranus entered Taurus, you know. So this is what we do. We try to, it's almost like a kind of ritual or a prayer or a meditation to start opening ourselves to the new sign.

Neptune has entered Aries just recently, aside from a little retrograde dip back into Pisces, is going to spend the next 14 years in the sign of Aries. Saturn's about to enter Aries at the end of May. We had a solar eclipse in Aries. Of course, Venus and Mercury both just turned retrograde in the sign of Aries. So there's been a lot to unpack in this temple of the zodiac.

So we're going to continue that today by considering this kind of outlandish. Admittedly, it's sort of a clickbait title, right? This is like, you know, was Jesus an Aries? Well, I don't know. Let's just get that out of the way. I have no clue. But why do people think that he might have been?

There is a significant community within the astrological world, there's a significant group of people, I should say, who tend to believe that Jesus was not, you know, a Capricorn born on the winter solstice, but rather, probably born sun sign anyway, in Aries. I think that's interesting. And when I first heard that, I wanted to know why.

And I wasn't interested in the technical reasons that, oh, well, you know, this was happening biblically, and so it must have been that time of year. Those are all, you know, anecdotally interesting to me. And I don't necessarily have a problem with those kinds of arguments, but I really wanted to know was like, Well, why do people think that Jesus was an Aries? Archetypally, right?

Like, what is it about his story, his life, whether you believe historical Jesus was the Messiah or not, or you're Christian or not, I don't care, just from the standpoint of, you know, the story. Like, why would people associate this figure, mythic or literal, with the sign of Aries? I want to know why.

So that's what began my exploration of this question over the years. This is something I presented before on my channel many years. It's been many years since I have presented this. But what I'm going to do to give us some context for this, and then I have five particular themes that Neptune in Aries will bring up that resonate with the Christ mythos, and I'm going to go into those after I set the stage with a little context from Liz Green.

So what I want to do first is there's a chapter, and I mentioned this recently. There's a book called *The Astrology of Fate* by Liz Green, one of my favorite books of all time. I've read everything that Liz Green has written. As far as I know, she's a treasure, and not that I necessarily, you know, I have my own differences of opinion with just about every author that you read.

Enough of you, some things you take, some things you don't. But she has in this book *The Astrology of Fate*, which is fantastic. She has a chapter called "Myth and the Zodiac." In this chapter, she breaks down some of the mythological and archetypal significations of each of the 12 signs. She starts with Aries.

And I want to read you a certain portion of this chapter to set the stage, so it's story hour, and if you don't like being read to, you can just click away. But anyway, here it goes the story, and she's going to start by telling us about the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece.

Then she's going to relate this to the sign of Aries, and then I'm going to build a bridge from that to the Christ mythos. The story of Jason is relevant to our exploration into the pattern of development inherent in Aries, for the fleece came from Iolkos, Jason's birthplace, and is in some way a symbol of his true father, his own inner spirit.

Jason's tale is typical of the hero myth. He was the rightful heir to the throne of Iolkos in Thessaly, but his wicked uncle usurped the power and the child's life was in danger. He was sent to the wise Centaur Chiron in secrecy, where he was raised and taught the arts of war.

The kingly inheritance usurped in the endangered infancy are, as Campbell points out in his work on the hero myth, archetypal patterns which appear in every hero's story. He is not automatically born a hero, but must come to it through trials and suffering in order to find what was always his had he but known it.

Jason must contend in his quest with two destructive males, two kings. And here we are presented with the archetypal struggle with the terrible father. In Neumann's work, *The Origins and History of Consciousness*, he writes about the fathers as the representatives of law and order.

Now, remember, in the sign of Aries, what have we talked about? We've talked about the sun being exalted here, and as the sun is exalted here, it is the emblem of law and order that kings are ideally supposed to embody, but frequently fail to embody, because who can be an ideal when you're a human, right?

But that is the ideal relationship between the son and the king, the king as an embodiment of coherence and law, cosmically. He writes about the fathers as representatives of law and order, handing down the highest values of civilization. They embody the world of collective values which manifest themselves in the psychic structure as conscience.

The hero must thus become a breaker of the old law, because he is the enemy of the old ruling system and the existing court of conscience. So he necessarily comes into conflict with the fathers and their personal spokesmen, who in the story of Jason are first, the wicked uncle, Pelias, and second, the sorcerer King Aeetes.

The wicked king, or personal father figure representing the old ruling system, sends the hero forth to fight the monster—Sphinx, witches, giants, wild beasts, etc.—hoping that it will prove his undoing. With the help of his divine father, however, which is something like the higher self within us, the hero succeeds in vanquishing the monster.

His higher nature and noble birth are victorious and are themselves proven in the victory. The ruin wished upon him by the negative father redounds to his glory and to the negative father's own ruin. Thus the old king's expulsion of the son, the hero's fight, and the killing of the father hang together in a meaningful way.

They form a necessary canon of events which, in symbol and in fact, are presupposed by the very existence of the hero, who, as the bringer of the new, has to destroy the old. Now think about this really quickly when it comes to the dignity of Saturn that we've talked about recently on my channel.

If you go back and listen to the talk I did on why Saturn is in its fall in Aries, we talked about this as the place of Saturn's fall, opposite to the exaltation of the sun. And the sun is in its fall in Libra, exaltation of Saturn. But what is going on there as the light of spring?

I have to point at my camera so it stops auto-tracking me. As the light of spring in the sign of Aries and the exaltation of the Sun, this is about the new, and one of the archetypal ways in which the new establishes itself is in contrast to or in opposition to the old.

This is, in a sense, why Saturn—the old, the limited, the structure, the tradition—is in its fall in the sign of Aries, which represents the new, not the old. So Saturn in Aries is very much about the downfall of fathers or of kings or of solar figures, insofar as they represent an old way of life, a way that needs to make way for something new.

When Jason came of fighting age, he returned to Iolkos resolved to claim his inheritance. On his journey, he lost a sandal while helping an old woman—who was really the goddess Hera in disguise—to cross a stream. Wicked uncle Pelias, meanwhile, had received an Oracle warning him to beware of a man with one sandal.

When the two confronted each other, Pelias put on a bland face, acknowledged Jason as the rightful heir, and promptly sent him off to retrieve the golden fleece, which his ancestor Phrixus had brought to Colchis, so that the disturbed ghost of Phrixus could be laid to rest.

Thus the terrible father sends the son off into danger, hoping, as Neumann says, that it will prove his undoing. Jason, in response to this, gathered together the famous crew of the Argonauts and made his voyage through many perils, helped by the gods Athene, Poseidon, and Hera, to the court of Aeetes.

Here, he slew the dragon with the help of the king's daughter, Medea, a priestess and sorceress, stole the fleece, returned to Iolkos, where he rid himself of Uncle Pelias and became king. Let me pause here to say, you know, one very interesting way in which she mentions that one of the ways that the king will have of trying to avoid the son or the young person pushing them out of power, or that they'll try to resist the new and cling to the old, will be to try to send the, you know, send the son off on a dangerous mission, and the mission they'll in the hopes that the mission will kill them.

And that there is an unconscious way in which the king is hoping that the son will die. Interesting to note, you know, Saturn was in the sign of Aries in the late 1960s as many of the most critical developments in the Vietnam War were taking place.

And I'm not like an expert on the Vietnam War or that period of history, but a key feature of that period of history was the feeling that the old man, in the form of the government, was sending its young men off to die at the very time in which many young people in the 1960s were insisting that something new take the place of something old.

It is not surprising during such a period of, you know, political and social upheaval and a demand for a new culture, a demand for a new way of being, is coming forth that there will be a way in which the old will try to send the young off to die.

I'm just making that, you know, just that's a simple observation about the late 1960s when Saturn was last in Aries that follows the archetypal themes that we're looking at here. The impulse to launch oneself into dangerous situations in order to prove one's manhood is characteristic of Aries.

And although it may sound strange at first, characteristic of the Aries woman as well, for this terrible father is not limited to men, nor is the quest for the true creative father within. So it's important to note that when we're using this father-son terminology, it's archetypal and psychic, which means that it is not literally tied to gender, right?

That's important. The fleece itself, the emblem of this inner and individual set of spiritual values, seems, as we have seen, to be the theriomorphic, or animal representation of the hidden God. King Aeetes, who is its guardian, is a cut above Pelias in that he is semi-divine and a sorcerer.

He is the archetypal terrible father, where Pelias is the personal one. That this is a fate rather than a mere imaginative exercise is suggested to me by the number of Aries people I have met—this is her speaking as the astrological counselor—who have been driven out into life suffering from problems with tyrannical or restrictive and destructive personal fathers.

This father has often emasculated his son, or has been overly critical and suppressive of the son's natural inheritance, or has blocked the son from any independent creative expression. Now remember, doesn't have to be literal gender—son, daughter. A similar situation often seems to occur in the lives of Aries women.

The father is no less dominant or restrictive in the husband, who is unconsciously chosen because he's like the father, and a necessary character in the myth takes over the role of refusing permission for an independent life. These things are greatly amplified when Saturn is in Aries, because the tension between the old and the new is amplified when Saturn is in Aries.

This pattern is not pathological. It is mythic, and is on some level, the image of Aries necessity. Here, father stands as both obstacle and the means of growth. So when we were talking about the kinds of confrontations and power struggles that are necessitated in the sign of Aries for the sake of spiritual and personal individuation, this is what she's talking about.

This pattern is not pathological. It is mythic, and is, on some level, the image of Aries necessity, the fate of this sign. Here, father stands as both the obstacle and as the means of growth. And what she's talking about is the father as the old, the father as the carrier of what came before and of what you both have to acknowledge, face, oppose, resist, and individuate through.

These are themes that come in the sign of Aries by the pairing of the sun exalted and Mars as the ruler—confrontations and war and battle and oppositional tensions and struggle with ruling systems, psychic systems of rule in our own minds, in our own lives, and socially.

Jason managed to find his fleece and bring it home again through the agency of a woman. This is also characteristic of the hero myth. For the woman is the Anima, the unconscious itself, in the guise of the helper and bride, who finds solutions where the individual ego can find none.

And hence, there is this incredible way in which the sign of Aries necessitates the power of the feminine, that the masculine cannot stand alone in the quest. And again, think of that energetically and psychically, not literally, although you could certainly say that there is a need for recognizing the very powerful and important role that the feminine plays in anything heroic happening.

It's like the masculine can't be heroic on its own. It needs the power of the Anima, the unconscious, the feminine as a guide, as a midwife. And that is something that happens in all of us, and it's not a literal gender thing, although there are some interesting ways you can map that out in terms of the ongoing discussion about gender equality.

But anyway, set that aside. Were Jason a female character, no doubt he would have been helped by an animus. For the animus in a woman's psyche seems to serve the same function in terms of development. So that's just to the same point.

In fact, more than one woman assisted Jason, for although the Argonauts comprise the boatload of male warriors, it was the goddess Hera, grateful for Jason's earlier service to her, who got him out of the nasty messes he encountered. She goes on about this for a while, and it's very fascinating.

I'm going to skip fast to another point. So at the end, after this, after he is victorious over everything, Jason plummeted steadily downhill, aging and impotent, and was finally killed by a blow on the head from a fallen timber broken from his own rotting ship.

The point here is really special. I'm not suggesting that the ignominious—I can't read that word—the difficult end of Jason is necessarily the fate of Aries, but his problem certainly is. It is ironic and true to the subtle, tragic, comic nuances of myth that the young hero who battles with the old, terrible father to inaugurate a new order should repudiate his own inner feminine self in order to court the very collective power which he had previously undergone his quest to fight.

The mysterious identity between the hero and his enemy is here implied, for Jason by the end of his story has become himself the terrible father, and the Nemesis which dogs him is that his own children are killed. On an inner level, perhaps this sad ending to a glorious tale is a necessary passage for Aries before a new cycle begins and a new quest arises for a new fleece.

The great deal may be destroyed before Aries rises out of his disintegration to pursue another challenge. Aries, his father and mother, rather than his son or daughter suffering at the hands of a domineering father, may discover that the myth is the same, but the roles have changed in his own inner—in his own children rebel against his latter-day tyranny.

So I'll stop there. Remember, I was talking about these power struggles, and one thing that's consistent with the sign of Aries is that when we struggle to overcome an old order, or to individuate and become different from our parents, even if they aren't the darkest characters, we still have to go through that.

When we have to free ourselves from the clutches of an angry sky god that doesn't work for us, that doesn't acknowledge and honor the relevance and dignity of our own personal experience, sovereignty, divinity, and participatory agency in life, and we have to wrestle the sanctity of our own soul from a shadow god.

You know, that's a process of spiritual and religious individuation that many people go through. And yet, when we wrestle back that light into our own possession, we can become possessed by it, which is to say, we can become the thing that we oppose. We can become a tyrannical sky god.

We can become an angry, overconfident figure where maybe we feel individuated, but we can come to resemble the very thing we opposed and resisted. That's a powerful lesson in this sign, and Saturn in Aries greatly amplifies that lesson, because it is in its fall in this sign, and the old doesn't go down easy, and the new often comes to be more Saturnian than it even realizes.

That is, you look back to the previous era that Pluto was in Aquarius, where it is again, and in, like, the French Revolution, some of the revolutionaries became tyrants very quickly. It's a temptation that we face to become empowered while resisting the urge to identify with the power that we're receiving, you know, to not become a vengeful person, a bitter, spiteful person, toward who and what we resist or oppose.

That is the mission: you resist, you individuate, you bring in the new, but you can't become a jerk. You just can't become a jerk. So anyway, now there are some really meaningful connections with the Christ story. Again, take this mythologically. Take it archetypally. Doesn't matter to me if you're a Christian or not.

I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything on the level of your own personal faith. Number one, in that story that she shares with us, she says that there is an archetypal struggle against the father from the son. What does that mean? Like, what?

Remember when she describes it archetypally? She says that in our own soul, there is the presence of a psychic father figure, cosmically, personally, and that father figure represents the thing that was established before we arrived on the scene as the son, as the new birth, as the new life, manifesting in a new body in this lifetime.

Right? So there's a way in which we are set up to oppose that old order, and it provides the means by which we inhabit an individuality that is authentic to us. So it's very natural. Psychically, this is just as simple as kids rebelling against their parents because they have to in order to individuate.

So parents don't take it too personally. But, you know, make sure that their rebellion doesn't throw their car off the road. You know what I mean? So it is somehow necessary that the son and father have this polarity, that there is a process of polarization between the two of them that serves the journey of individuation, the individual hero's journey that we all take in life.

That is emblematic—like it is the symbol of the son, the symbolic one of the great symbolic meanings of the sun: individuation, finding your purpose, following a path. So one of the things that can happen in this sign is that in resistance to when the established order sees the new coming up, they feel threatened by it, because they are not able, on some level, to accept death, to accept the natural process of change and evolution.

So the old will resist the new. In some ways, it has to. In some ways, it's necessary. In the metaphysics of the universe, that the old resists the new because it provides the means by which the new can become strong and establish itself.

But then there's also a level at which the old will try to actively suppress the new or even try to kill it. And so in this Christian mythology, we have an exploration of that dynamic that is flipped on its head in a very beautiful way.

I think, you know, as someone who embraces this mythos as a core part of my own spiritual path, even though I don't identify as a Christian necessarily—but I was raised the preacher's kid, so it's a deep part of my own psyche—in the story of Christ, you have Christ as the Son of the Father, God the Father, God the Son.

So they're archetypally constellating in this dynamic. Now, on one level, the Father has sent the Son on a mission that will lead to the son's death, right? So it's just like that theme that we brought up. However, what the father says is, in this case, the story—just as basically as I can outline it—the father says, Yes, I'm going to kill you, but not as a way of preventing the new and feeling threatened by it, but instead, as a way of joining and marrying above and below, father and son, old and new.

I remember he says, I haven't come to abolish the Old Covenant, the Old God. And he's speaking now to, of course, to the whole history of Judaism that Jesus identifies himself as a part of. But I've come to fulfill it, right? So there's a way in which the subsequent resurrection of Christ comes in the story, just again, mythologically speaking, whatever we may think did or did not happen historically, if Jesus did or didn't resurrect, right?

But symbolically, the resurrection of Jesus is he says, I'm going to kill you, but then I'm going to raise you up. And that is what is meant by the marriage of an old covenant with a new covenant. That the old has to kill the young, but it will also raise the young up.

Now think about that, just from the level of parenting, that's kind of like super basic, beautiful parenting advice insofar—and I'm not like, I don't mean to make too literal of a comparison—but it's a there's a parallel, right? In parenting, there's elements of your kids' naivete, youthfulness, that a parent has to kill, you know?

I've seen it in the process of, you know, my wife having to set boundaries at bedtime with the kids, you know, and in so doing, it feels kind of like, it feels a little bit like a death that you're provoking in them. But because you provoke that death, right, you're raising them up into self-sufficiency.

And so, in a very basic way, the father not just killing the son, but killing the son and raising him from the dead—that process that then unites the father and son in a communion, an old and a new, an Old Covenant, a new covenant, completing something—that is ideally how the new and the old should work together.

There is a dance that's there. This is the sign of Aries. The sign of Aries is about youthful, immature, childish, selfish things that have to die in us because they encounter a more mature way of life. But then there's a simultaneous way in which, if we're willing to go on that journey, that adventure, where we have to do a little dying and a little growing, and a little, you know, ridding ourselves of some kind of arrogance or self-centeredness—that's part of the process.

We will be lifted up, and the new within us, the spirit, will inherit something that we are then tasked to carry. That's the ideal process, right? Because otherwise, what happens is, you know, the father kills the son because the father is afraid of the power of the son, or the son, you know, takes revenge on the father, but then becomes like the father.

The Christian mythos, it just on a super basic level—Joseph Campbell has written about this, Carl Jung has written about this—so I'm not the first to say it. I don't consider myself contributing anything like super unique here, but it's just very basic that when the father kills the son, but lifts the son up, and the resurrection is a part of that story, that is the ideal dynamic between old and new, parent and child that the sign of Aries is going to constellate for us.

It's very resonant with the Christian mythos. So the second part of my list here—five ways in which this Neptune in Aries experience will be Christian-like—is insofar as the son redeems the father. This is an interesting way of looking at the Christian story, and probably unique to my evangelical—I mean, it wasn't super evangelical.

I was raised in the United Methodist Church, which is a very moderate, pretty liberal community of Protestants. But anyway, one of the ways that, of course, the Christian story is spun—and I'm not saying this is always necessarily with good intentions, right—but one of the ways that you'll hear the ways that you'll hear the Christian story spun if you grew up in a Protestant church is that this old way of doing things was like eye for eye, tooth for tooth.

It was just this vengeful Old Testament God, you know, there's—and that's, I don't think that's necessarily fair. I have had many really thoughtful, beautiful Jewish friends in my life, and I've learned, you know, like, that's not necessarily the truth.

So anyway, but the Christian way of spinning things will be, you know, that the that Jesus as an embodiment of God that does things in a different way is in some ways redeeming and healing the karma of the Father God image that had prevailed up until that point.

Now, again, that's a very like, that's a messaging that, you know, I don't think is—there's more to it than that, but that's one way that the Christian story has been told over and over again. Now, regardless of again, how literally we take that, the archetype is important.

There is a way in which the old is redeemed by the new. I mean, how simple is it, right? We carry the weight of trying to improve upon the ancestral karma of our parents, of our father, of the old way of doing things. We try to make it just a little bit better.

And in this way, we bring healing and we sanctify and redeem the old. So it's not just about replacing the old, because the old is a tyrant. It's about healing the old in illuminating and continuing the journey of illumination and healing.

And it's interesting to me that the sign of Aries carries so much potential for illumination and healing, because a lot of the times we think about this sign as a sign of war, but if you think of Jesus as an Aries who brought light—and Liz Green makes a point in another part of that chapter about the light-bearing quality of Aries—that we don't think about it as the exaltation of the sun and a place of great illumination.

When someone young and charismatic comes along, there are many elders who celebrate the newness, you know, who celebrate progress, who celebrate, yeah, you, you can. You're bringing something that's better than where we got you to. And thank God, and hopefully someone will follow you who will do the same, because we don't fear—and we don't fear that we're getting outgrown, because we see ourself as connected to you.

And so you came through us. You redeem us, you heal us, you take the torch forward. That's an Aries theme, very, very powerful theme in Aries. Number three, the son has to fight the father for right to the throne. Now, I think that there is a—at the beginning of the Jesus story is the attempt to assassinate Jesus by Herod, right?

That's the gospel version of the story. So you have immediately the—and I mentioned this earlier—is the father has to kill the son. But there's a reverse to this, which is that the thought that the son has to escape the confines of the father or the attempts by the father made upon the son's life.

So there are many. There's a story of finding safe passage, or of evading or escaping someone that's trying to harm you, and that is an adventure that is implied by the sign of Aries. That's right out of the, you know, it's right there at the beginning of the of the story of Jesus, that the that there will be someone who will try to take you out before you can realize it.

Now that that sort of like the father killing the son. But in this sense, it's also about escaping the confines of someone or something that will try to limit you. I mean, he's trying to kill him. And so there's you have to, like, you might have to deal with a murderous father.

And in some ways, when you're reading the story of Jesus, you're like, My God, God's like, gonna murder his own son. You know, it's like. It's pretty epic, but, you know, and Herod tries to kill him at his birth, doesn't even want him to be born.

So there's this way in which you may have to evade or escape things that suppress or oppress, which is present at the beginning of Jesus's life, you know? So anyway, it's just a slightly different nuance to take on the story that is also a big part of Aries, Saturn in Aries in particular.

How many stories have I heard about oppressive marriages or oppressive fathers or, you know, whatever the case might be, someone grew up—I remember a story, I think I might have shared this one not too long ago—someone who grew up in a military home and in their their dad died.

And, you know, just like sometimes it's the backdrop that seems like it's trying to squeeze the life out of you, and you have to escape it and find a different story. And you have to find—you have to find those—it's like, you know, there's a king trying to kill Jesus, and then there's these astrologers from the east coming to mark the birth of a special figure, and you have to find your way to the Magi that bless your birth and escape the circumstances that would want to strip you of the inherent dignity of your birth.

That's what I'm that's what I'm trying to get at there. Number four, son has to carry the legacy of the father while also individuating. This is a tricky balance. And you find this all throughout the Gospel story, where Jesus quotes the scriptures and said he has not come to destroy them or to usurp them or to make them irrelevant, but rather to fulfill them.

Now again, this is the Christian story. This is the Christian perspective. It's a mythos of its own. So don't you know? Take it on that level if you prefer, you know, nothing more. But the son carrying the legacy of the father is a lot like Jesus staying true to—I mean, he teaches and preaches in the temples of his ancestors, and yet his mission is to be a kind of revolutionary within the faith.

Now, again, whether you accept that or not is absolutely not important to me. I believe the mythology is important. And so what does it mean to recognize and honor our ancestors, the old, the father, quote-unquote, while carrying forth the mission of being our own person?

There it is—same tension, and it's present in the life of Jesus, while he constantly has the authority figures of his own faith tradition criticizing him, in a sense, and yet he's trying to stay true and honor his tradition while carrying it forward in a direction that is unique to his own teachings and mission, you might say.

Now, finally, individuality is found through sacrifice and taking a stand. There is usually something that one has to die for. We're going to be doing one more exploration of the sign of Aries in relation to the themes of martyrs and assassination.

And it's a heavy topic, but I think I'm going to be exploring it with the same depth and care that I, you know, explore everything else, and I find, I think most people will find it valuable and not like sensational at all, but many, in many ways, the process of individuating and establishing my own unique role, my own unique purpose, in contrast to what came before me, or tradition or authority, or parents, or whatever that is—so much at this, at the sign of Aries—will involve a person needing to separate themselves from something that is status quo and take a stand for something that they believe in that is a mark of their individuation journey.

Jesus dies for a cause. Young men during the time of the Vietnam War era, while Saturn was in its fall in Aries—and I watched the Ken Burns documentary on Vietnam, which was fascinating—they often felt like they, in order to mark their emergence into manhood, they needed to become a soldier and go off to war and be willing to die for something.

That was a myth that was tremendously impactful on the lives of young men who decided they wanted to go to war. Of course, many were drafted and didn't have a choice at all. But then, coming back from war, many of the reflections that were present—and I think of Lieutenant Dan from *Forrest Gump*, if you remember that as a kind of a classic example of this—said that wasn't the stand that I needed to take.

That wasn't my fight. This wasn't our war. That is a common sentiment during the Vietnam War era, while Saturn was in Aries, that many young men made that realization when they came back. I thought someone else's war. I thought I was taking a stand for me, but I was being co-opted, and my need to take a stand, which is archetypal, was sort of co-opted by the old man, by the government for a war that I don't really identify with.

You see what I mean? So it becomes so important that there is a stand that is taken, that is my own, and it, you know, and that's where it can get pretty intense, like people in the sign of Aries, there's almost like an edge you have to hit where you're like, you know, the as far as I go with how willing I am to stand for something is as deep as I am able to realize my own individual importance and, like, inner spiritual sovereignty or something.

So anyway, this is obviously a huge part of the Christ mythos, as Jesus dies for on behalf of what he believes in, what he stands for. And this is because he then goes through the process of resurrection. He is made new. He is, you know, the transfiguration occurs, and there's a there is a sense of being born into a spiritual light body or something.

These are metaphors or images of what we become the deeper we go into taking a stand for the things that we believe in, that we identify with. Of course, it can go really far, and so we're gonna also explore why these exact themes of sacrifice can tilt us into the realm of things like martyrdom and assassinations in another episode.

That's it for today. I hope you found this interesting. I know some of this stuff is really provocative, and again, although I've issued this qualifier at least 10 times today, I just want to say that when you put yourself into the realm of exploring a whole faith tradition's mythology and archetypes, it can be triggering, because not all of us have had positive experiences with this, or we may feel like there's something offensive about some of the ways in which a faith tradition looks at things or sees things.

I think if we step back and appreciate the mythology of various faith traditions, there's a lot to be learned as astrologers. So that's the spirit in which I hope I conveyed all of this today. And on that note, I hope you're having a good day, and we'll see you again tomorrow. Bye.