A Solar Eclipse in Aries — What it Means When the King Dies

Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology. Today we're going to take a look at the upcoming solar eclipse in the sign of Aries. This eclipse is happening over the weekend, as well as Neptune's entrance into Aries, which comes right after it. So, of course, that's all we're talking about in the astrology world right now. And obviously, you know, it's understandable. Eclipses are a big deal. We always talk a lot about eclipses, and we talk a lot about outer planets changing signs. We've had a couple of retrogrades in the sign of Aries as well. So a lot of attention is drawn to this.

I want to look at this eclipse today from a very particular standpoint. In ancient astrology, one of the most common things that was said in ancient Western astrology about eclipses, solar eclipses in particular, was that they often were omens of the death or downfall of a king. If you look at what ancient Vedic Astrology said, in general, they also thought of eclipses as signifying potential, very significant, major changes, upheavals, and often leading to some sense of disruption in the natural, cosmic balance of things. Why? So we're going to talk about that why today and unpack what else might be meant by the death of a king, because that symbolism of the king and the sun have a very interesting, esoteric, and philosophical origin. And so we're going to look at that today and explore how we might take that death of the king, both metaphorically and imaginatively or figuratively, as well as literally. And I think that this will give us at least one more unique way of thinking about the eclipse. I'll probably do a little bit more content tomorrow as well. But yeah, let's dive into it.

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So on that note, let's see here. Where am I? Okay? Here we go. I'm going to put up the real-time clock, and let's take a look at this eclipse. Here it is coming up on March 29, so that is Saturday. We sit a couple of days away from that right now, and the solar eclipse, if we back this up, just to get it right on the mark, is going to be happening. Let's see here. I believe the eclipse is happening at 9:00. That's right, exactly the ninth degree, I guess, depending probably on where you're located. But you'll see this at a different time. But this is about six in the morning, central time, on Saturday, March 29. So solar eclipse on that day, major solar eclipse with both, you know, Mercury and Venus having recently gone retrograde and stationing to turn retrograde right around that ninth, 10th degree as well, with also Neptune preparing to enter Aries on Sunday, March 30. So that solar eclipse is where the sun is exalted in the sign of Aries. If you have things around that ninth degree of Aries, ninth or 10th degree of Aries, boy, you have gotten a series of transits recently. If you have something around nine or 10 degrees of any of the cardinal signs, you've really got these transits cooking in your chart. But anyhow, I want to talk today about some of the symbolism behind eclipses that have existed for thousands of years.

The number one symbol that has recurred since even prior to the advent of horoscopic astrology in the ancient world, dating back to ancient omen astrology, omen traditions in the Mesopotamian region of the world and in other parts of the world as well, is that solar eclipses are like they portend the death of the king, that they are omens or signs of the death of the king. Well, what does that mean? Obviously, there's a long history of solar eclipses being related to the death or passage of solar figures, which means a leader, a father, a king, a ruler, a CEO, an executive. It could even be a female; the gender doesn't necessarily need to be literal, but the solar figure, a person of prominence, a leader, a central, shining figure, even a famous person, military leader. You have those figures; there's a well-documented history of those figures passing around the times of eclipses. I remember doing a study of this early in my career. I did a presentation, and I showed how eclipses were configured in the deaths of many famous people in terms of the proximity of the eclipse, quite predictable. So all of that is to say there is a level at which I believe that solar eclipses can and often do bring literal downfalls, deaths, or changes of power with respect to people who are in positions of solar prominence, leadership, etc. So that's like a real thing, but there's also a more metaphorical and philosophical level at which we can talk about the king and its meaning in ancient astrology, as well as Vedic astrologers saying that there's a kind of disruption of cosmic balance that happens when solar eclipses occur. Like, why is that, and what else does the king represent?

So let's start by getting into the ancient philosophical imagination, the largely underlying philosophy that most likely informed the progenitors of Hellenistic or horoscopic astrology. They were probably Platonists, Pythagoreans, coming out of the Platonic tradition, which has, in turn, influences that come from Egypt. And Egypt was a melting pot that was also influenced by India. So it's not like it's just one group or people, but in short, the astrology, the planets as omens or signs or indicators of the gods, are part of a tradition in which the gods themselves are thought of as something like organizing divine structures in the mind of the universe, or the mind of the cosmic animal, or the mind of God, and this material world in which things are constantly fluctuating and changing and transforming are doing so as they reflect these divine ideal archetypal forms. And so astrology is a means by which we can remember and stay in conscious contact with those eternal, divine forms that we can notice and see reflected here in the unfolding of our experiences, our psychology, the fated events of life, and in so doing, we can recall and stay in conscious contact, so to speak, with our own eternal nature as spirit souls whose lives become the medium for these archetypal fields. So that's a wow. It's a pretty profound philosophical idea. Those are profound ideas to work with as astrologers and to live a life by means of those ideas, for me, has been just breathtaking, magical, mystical. I don't pretend to know the mind of the universe or to know exactly how it all works. It's all way above my pay grade, but this basic philosophy to me, it makes sense, and I can see and experience the forms, and when I reflect upon them, my life feels like a moving meditation. And I love astrology for that reason.

The one planet that was most central to the entire language of tropical astrology is the sun. And the reason for that is that it's the sun's annual path, the ecliptic, that defines the Zodiac itself, and the Zodiac itself is arranged and organized according to an underlying rationale that has to do with the alternation of light and dark that constitutes the solar year. So the whole system is solar-centric in that way. For that reason, the sun is the most archetypally emblematic of the archetypal realm itself. So when Plato says that the prisoner gets out of the cave to understand the forms, the real forms in the mind of God, he's under the light of the sun outside of the cave. And there's a way in which the sun becomes the planetary emblem within our language of all that is of a transcendental nature. And the fact that we can see that transcendental nature at all is given by means of the light of the sun, which metaphorically is the light of our conscious awareness, which is the light of our illumination from within, as we evolve spiritually and so on and so forth. So that illuminating, life-giving, archetypal, universal, divine, eternal principle is rooted in the sun, and insofar as that principle is encapsulated within the organizing principles of a society and its ruler, the ruler, the king, is thought to be an embodiment of God or of the archetypal realm, and that exists as a political slash metaphysical idea in the ancient world, regardless of how well that works in practice or not. I'm certainly not advocating for monarchy, right? But what it does is it says a leader, ideally, is a human embodiment of the divine, intelligent arrangement of the cosmos itself, and a society will then experience a kind of orderliness, sanity, clarity, and coherence because it lives according to the laws that the king provides and embodies. You're thinking of ancient kings as both the embodiment of the divine archetypal law of the universe, as well as the laws that will govern and guide a civilization in ways that are coherent, just, beautiful, true. Now again, all of that is very ideal. Have we lived up to that? No. Is monarchy necessarily the best idea? No. Right. On and on we go. But insofar as you understand all of this as archetypal, as philosophical, then there's a lot there for us that we can learn from, regardless of what form our civilization takes today, or regardless of what styles of government we practice, or whatever, because the idea is still so beautiful and so much at work in our lives.

So when we think of the sun as the king, but we take away the literalness of kingship, and we think instead of that which offers a kind of governing, overarching sense of unity, purpose, clarity, a sense of justice or justness, and I don't mean that in a punitive way, but there's a sense that things are right, good, true, coherent, sort of moral, virtuous, clear, life-giving, supportive, and unified. All of that is the sort of ideal archetypal sun. So insofar as we have a connection to that in our lives, most of us would probably say that our spirituality resembles some of those adjectives. My spiritual path helps me stay on a good course, a virtuous course, a course that's aligned. We might say alignment is also a very solar-like idea insofar as the universe is governed by alignment, principles of energy, something like that, even that is very solar in terms of the way ancients thought about the sun. So when we have these principles in our life that we live by, they offer us coherence. They illuminate us from within. They show us the path. They give us a clear sense of purpose and moral compass, etc., etc. And they may look for you that path might be goddess worship; for someone else, it might be Taoism or Christianity, or maybe it's nameless. It doesn't have to belong to any kind of institution. But you know what it is because it illuminates you from within, and it grants a sense of coherence, clarity, sanity, purpose. I remember Stephen Forrest talking about the sun as the sanity-giving principle in our lives. Love that. Anyway, so that's the king, or you could call it the queen. It doesn't matter. It's just that is the thing that governs. Interestingly, the sun was also called "daimon," which has this sense of invoking a guide that's in us, that our conscience, or Jiminy Cricket, or a spirit guide, or angels or things that work with us to show us the alignment in the path, in the way. So if you can take all of that and just think that that is also meant any time the word king is invoked on a philosophical level in relation to the sun, all of those ideas are applicable that I just mentioned. That is where we get the deeper meaning of a solar eclipse from because when the sun, the light of the sun is eclipsed, darkness goes across it, then we may have these following things: five things that the death of the king can mean, five meanings of the death of the king that are not about literal kings dying, although one of my numbers on this list will involve literal figures. But more on that in a second.

The first one is that insofar as the sun represents an ideal, because our lives are lived always in many different ideals in many different areas of life hold out to us a sense of guidance. This is where I'm going. This is the direction. This is what's right and wrong along this path. This is that inner sense of guidance, conscience, purpose, direction, moral clarity, spiritual clarity, that's directing things. We're in touch with that. If you live a spiritual life, it's all about staying in touch with that somehow. But there are going to be times where the guiding images and principles and ideas and directions that we've had die because in this world, everything passes. It's funny to me that I'll never forget this, when some of my first Ayahuasca ceremonies, and I was really experiencing the death of the Christianity I was raised with, does not mean the death of, you know, my affinity for the teachings of the Christ consciousness, so to speak, but the institutional, the United Methodist church I grew up in, all that kind of stuff, was sort of dying, and I was expressing my sadness about it in a ceremony. And one of the shaman's apprentices, who spoke English, said, you know, in some ways, when things die, it's because they've served their purpose, and that's not a bad thing, and that everything is sort of fully realized when it dies because its purpose has been served. I mean, it was a poetic teaching, right? I don't know how literally to take that, but wow, sometimes in our lives, ideals that we have been living by or with that have meant a lot, that have taken us somewhere, they expire. That can be the death of the king, the guiding principle, the guiding idea, the guiding image, dies. That is the death of the king, philosophically speaking. So that is something that happens when eclipses occur. However, one of the things that comes along with it is that often, in the wake of that death of an ideal or a path or a purpose, obviously, in this world of generation and regeneration, of death and rebirth as a constant cycle, a new purpose will follow. And so the most optimistic way people talk about solar eclipses is about new opportunities that will open like a powerful new moon. It's important not to skip past the part where an idea or an ideal or an archetypal image may also die because that is and always has been a part of the symbolism, which is why, more than any other thing in ancient astrology, you'll hear them talking about the death of the king.

Number two is that a path ends, but often a new one begins. This is what I was just saying. But if you think about when a path ends, sometimes the way that it occurs is that you realize that something is no longer viable. It is no longer a fertile path. It's no longer life-giving, it's no longer life-supporting. It is no longer generative. It is no longer creatively satisfying. It is no longer effective. It is no longer satisfying. Any of those things are often symptomatic of a path ending. The sun being eclipsed, the king dying. But often it is through it is the sort of via negativa, which means the way that opens through negation. When a no comes, it is often exactly in that negative space that is, it's the clearest way that we get to our yes, which is also the most constructive way. I love to talk about Saturn returns with my clients when they're going through one. You know, it's like, look, Saturn will give you a clear sense of what's reached its end, its limit, its expiration, where you can't go any further with something, and often, though there's disappointment and pain and loss around that, there's also what accompanies it. For most people, is a very clear sense of what your yeses are, where the no comes out most vividly, often it is accompanied paradoxically by a very clear sense of yes, this other thing. So is it true that, in every single case, a solar eclipse leads to a new beginning? Kind of, but it's more about the thing that's ending and what comes out of the space around it. And medieval astrologers, in particular, spend a lot of time talking about the fact that 12 to 18 months around the time of an eclipse, which maps out to approximately the time in which the nodes will continue creating eclipses in the same signs, that that eclipse degree can become a very sensitive point for future transits in your chart in the sky and mundane astrology, and that the ongoing effects of that eclipse have a way of slowly manifesting. And so we also have to remember that this path ending and a new one beginning is often part of the sequence of ongoing eclipses as well. This is also our final eclipse in Aries. So interesting to think about it from that perspective. But regardless, knowing that the ending is that really the ending is the beginning, and that's a different way of looking at death and rebirth than the really flowery, "Oh, you're going to experience this amazing new beginning." Usually, it's a little bit more like a beginning will clarify itself coming out of the darkness of a path being eclipsed.

Number three is the literal one: a solar figure passes away. But even then, it's important to talk about what happens to us psychologically. So I've talked to many, many people over my career, between 13 and 14,000 at this point, which I keep track of because it's an interesting way of sort of charting your journey as an astrologer. How many souls have I talked to over a long period of time? And at this stage in my career, I can honestly say that I have seen a lot of fathers die around solar eclipses. It's just a thing that happens. Does it happen every time for every person? Absolutely not, but it happens enough that it's a thing. So one of the things that I have noticed is that aside from the actual loss and grief of the relationship itself, even if the relationship was a hard one, people often, you know, don't have any less grief, right? But there's this amazing thing that happens. I've noticed this over and over again, which is that when a quote-unquote literal father dies, an archetypal image of the father that was projected onto the father, that sort of has to be, I don't know that we can't help but do that, also dies, which means, in a way that we haven't, and that's what can we say that is other than ancestral karma burning off, I guess. But when a father passes, there's a way in which the image of the father, which is an archetypal image that, in so many ways, is just, it's beyond gender really. It's a kind of archetypal image, really. And, you know, so there's a little redundant, but it is just that. And when a father dies, time and time again, what I see my clients do is reconstructing what that archetype is going to look like in their own psyche going forward. Some of that has to do with how we start the process of memorialization. Memorialization can be about that there was a realm called memorial that, anyway, that's a whole different topic, really interesting one. But the realm of memory is a very fluid realm, and any of you who have done therapy know that when you change your own consciousness, when you go through processes of healing, you have an active way in which you will start changing your own memories. And it's not that you're manipulating what happened. It's that you're thinking and feeling about what happened differently, and it has a way of it feels like it actually changes the past somehow. I know you probably know what I'm talking about, and I don't mean that we're whitewashing things to make them better than they really were. It's nothing like that. It's subtler than that, and it is something that when a solar figure passes away, we will enshrine that image and memorialize it, while also it's now placed somewhere, but that also means that a new, living, vibrant image will take its place. So what I think is really interesting is the kinds of psychic and psychological changes and changes of consciousness that start to happen when a person that has carried the mantle of solar authority or a solar archetype passes away when they leave their body. It's as though the projection of that archetype or association that we make with that person also goes away. We'll probably have a way of enshrining it or remembering it, maybe remembering it differently, or starting to think about it differently than when it was literally here. That differentiation is really interesting. And then there's also the new way in which the archetype will form or present itself. All of that is a deep sort of psychic, alchemical, or psychological way in which solar eclipses affect us when they are tied to literal people: a boss, a king, a ruler, a president, a dad, whatever the case might be, passing.

Number four is that solar eclipses are often, it's a funny thing because they have in them the making of a beginning, but also a death. And so when I was talking about earlier, when I said an idea or ideal dies, one of the things that can happen is that we come to understand the death of an ideal by understanding by looking at its fruits and understanding its origin. So solar eclipses can be times in which certain kinds of karma manifest, meaning the karma that comes from the past, its outcome, its blossom, takes place, and you go, wow, there's a karmic result. It is heavy and rich and dense, and it's right in front of me. And what it does is whatever it is, it will also serve to make you understand, help you understand where it came from, what its roots were, what its origins were, which, on a psychological level and a reflective level, can be really useful because you can understand the roots of certain ideas, thoughts, behaviors, and how they led to certain actions or outcomes. Well, you can see that in yourself or in other people sometimes, and it becomes this meditation on how things can go based on how we start things with powerful karmic lessons around those kinds of dynamics that solar eclipses.

Finally, number five, in Vedic Astrology, it's said in different various places that there's a way in which cosmic balance is disturbed. What is meant by that, other than to say that an image, an ideal, something that held everything together, feels like it's chaotically falling apart, and there's this liminal space where a new world has not yet formed. In that space, things can feel like there's a little upheaval or chaos. It's also important to recognize because there's a way in which solar eclipses have almost like a Uranian or Plutonian signature behind them, and some people will experience that upheaval, disruption of balance or order. Remember, the king, the sun, representing that which grants coherence and unification, the unification that we see in the Zodiac itself, which is rooted in the sun, the unification we see as in there are intelligible forms that give us an ordered, beautiful, true, just cosmos that temporarily, for a moment when the sun is eclipsed, it feels like that sense of understanding things and knowing what's going on is just confused or disrupted by a kind of divine chaos, let's call it. So it's temporary, but when you're living in the wake of an eclipse, it might take a little bit to feel like you're in a sane, orderly space again, and that's normal. This is why, during eclipses, one of the things that's also frequently recommended in Vedic Astrology will be, you know, lay low, take care of yourself. You might want to fast, to do your yoga. I mean, there's so many remediation techniques. But the thing that I love about it is that there's a hey, if, I mean, there were literal instructions, like for the kings within 40 days of eclipses, to not go outside, you know, stuff like that. I'm not advocating for that kind of superstition, but it is. Eclipses are times in which it doesn't hurt to pay attention to yourself if things are feeling chaotic, and to sort of lay low and tend to yourself within without obviously becoming a delusional narcissist, New Age weirdo. Sorry, I couldn't help. Okay. Anyway, that's it for today. And I hope that this was a useful exploration of some philosophy and some meaning behind the eclipse. I hope you're having a good one, and we will see you again soon. Bye, everyone.