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Listen for Aries and Aries Rising

2013 Annual Horoscope by Eric Francis

Sign art by Debra Cortese.

Aries Part One
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Aries Part Two
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Music for Aries Remembrance by Blue O’Connell
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Listen for Aries and Aries Rising | 2013 Annual Reading by Eric Francis
Full minor planet list for the day that the Sun arrives in your sign.

There is room in the world for you. This is true no matter how different you feel and no matter how different you are. The chances are you may be feeling the impulse to be different, to stand out and to reinvent yourself. You may know this is a moment to set yourself free, from your circumstances, from your self-concept, from a relationship, from the past.

And there is space for you to do that. The world has the flexibility for you to do that. You belong here, and you came here to do the things that you know you want to do, and that are right for you. You may not feel that way; I am amazed that anyone feels they belong on the planet or that there is enough space for them, though I assure you — there is space for you, for how you want to express yourself, and for who you are.

I mean that literally, as actual, physical space, as well as room within the various professional and personal contexts in which you might want to express your ideas and participate in a more meaningful way. We are in a moment of global change, and though it’s chaotic and riddled with setbacks, there is a meeting place between where you are changing and where the world is changing.

For reasons that may be obvious to some, this is not merely self-serving; it’s not about you doing your thing, everyone else be damned. There’s confusion about this issue of self-serving, which runs into conflict with a diversity of ‘spiritual’ values. You are experiencing several deeply personal transits by planets with an interpersonal or collective energy. The goal for maximum personal success is to reach for the greatest good for all concerned. That must start with experimenting with what is right for you, and then noticing where that plan fits into the larger scheme of things.

There are times when the greatest good translates to you taking care of yourself. Pay attention carefully for when that is true. Remember, it’s not going to be true all the time; it may not even be true most of the time. Keep an eye on that balance. If you’re listening to your astrology, you will be feeling the calling to participate in bigger ways than you ever have before. This is integral with the idea of success, or finding your mission, or your purpose, or doing the right thing. What is good for the world really is good for you. What is good for you is good for the world. When a conflict arises, that’s the time to pause and do a careful assessment of your values and your choices.

Looking at The New York Times on any random day would be enough to convince you that the world is falling apart. Certainly, at the least, the world is in a moment of change, of crisis and of urgent necessity for decision. At this time we need people with alert and inventive minds to help us all get into the next phase in one piece.

We need people who identify as inventors and problem solvers, and that would be you. We need people who are confident enough to act on their ideas, and to participate in a time of uncertainty when there are no guarantees. Confidence is your deepest psychological issue; I will come back to that topic soon, because it’s so central to your happiness.

Your astrology describes an intersection point between your life and the wider life around you. This is an imposing concept for some, and an inviting one for others — though I have no doubt you’ve had forms of this message showing up on your radar many times over the past few years. Now is the time to act on them.

We’re All In This Together

Uranus, a planet that is documented to be associated with some of the greatest inventions of our time (the light bulb, the airplane and many others) is in your sign or crossing your ascendant; that means that it’s becoming a salient feature in your identity and your mental process. Uranus in your sign also suggests that you’re reinventing yourself, though Uranus brings in the group dynamic, the opportunity to share and the reminder that we’re in this together.

The problem with Uranus is that it can be an erratic quality. It tends to work in fits and starts, followed by a breakthrough. What I suggest you do is apply the energy in a consistent way, as best you can, from day to day over time.

At the same time, Pluto is moving through Capricorn, your 10th solar house, or 10th house by whole-sign houses if you’re Aries rising. Pluto through Capricorn has been like a demolition squad for old values and systems. It’s the current metaphor for how the world does not stay the same for any two days running, though many of the changes are so deep that most of them are invisible. It’s necessary to actually study a situation, and to look at it in a creative way, to see what is happening.

What I suggest you recognize is that Pluto in Capricorn is an extended moment of profound change, and that you have this situated in the angle of your chart where you relate to the world as a professional: through your career, through the leadership you offer, and through your personal strength and integrity.

You may be experiencing Pluto in Capricorn as instability. It’s possible that so far it has represented only change that has dislodged you in some way, rather than creating an opening. A lot of people are getting shaken out of the system. Some are recognizing that they didn’t belong there, or that they’re done with that way of life. Yet the way forward is not necessarily so clear.

This is where it’s necessary to be a visionary in your own life. It’s no longer possible for us to depend on the world’s systems, particularly the older ones, to be something that really provides opportunity. It’s not enough to do it ‘right’. It’s necessary to actually be creative, and this means turning on the parts of your brain that have the ability to see something where there is nothing, or to see a useful pattern in the seeming chaos.

This astrology could have you feeling ambitious, with a goal of personal achievement and moving up in the world and being a big success. I suggest, however, that ambition and the personal drive for success would not only be misguided but potentially hazardous.

You have a purpose; you’re being called to that purpose; you are setting yourself free so that you have the opportunity to fulfill that purpose. Be grateful that it’s not all about you. The vanity, egotism and self-centeredness that the world extols as virtues are actually debilitating weaknesses. You will draw strength and renewal from actually participating in new ways, making a point to push yourself into unfamiliar territory.

The Skill of Politics

One essential skill I suggest you study and learn is politics. I don’t mean politics in the sense of the neurotic game going on in Washington, D.C. and nearly all statehouses and city halls, but rather the skill of human relations toward a purpose; the skill of working within organizational structures.

Be mindful in your dealings with the government, whether on the topic of taxes, parking tickets or the lawfulness of anything you may do in business, particularly on the level of regulations. Meet time deadlines, know the rules, and respect them. It’s essential that you conduct yourself honestly in business. The karmic stakes are higher this year; you have greater potential for success, and higher potential consequences if you don’t honor the rules of the road.

Yet there is a subtler level than following rules, which is understanding the dynamics of human relationships and how authority is organized. It’s rarely about brute force, though in national politics in the U.S. and elsewhere, it’s increasingly becoming so. I suggest you tune in to the subtle level, for example, understanding the difference between formal power and informal power.

Formal power is the principal of a high school; informal power is a very influential student who sways public opinion, but who has no office with a nameplate. Formal power is the director of the DMV setting policy; informal power is the window clerk letting you file your registration a day late.

Both formal and informal forms of power are meaningful, they have a relationship and you have a relationship to both.

Politics is one of the master arts that is essential for success in any wider context than living merely to put food on the table. It is a language, a set of concepts and a behavioral analysis that people who succeed in the world understand and work with.

The purpose of politics, in your case, is not about conforming to structures that are subject to politics; it’s about recognizing that to be even partially independent of those systems (i.e., not totally dependent on them) it’s necessary to understand how to work with others, and to get people to work together, toward common goals. It becomes even more important where there are differences in goals and philosophies, so that compromises and win-win situations can be reached and things can proceed forward.

Part of the problem with the world now is that we are what I call post-political. Political power is used more to obstruct than it is to facilitate. You need to be mindful of this as you learn to navigate through organizational structures, and identify those who actually want to cooperate. Post-political has a positive side in that we do need something better, though anything that works is going to take understanding motives and psychology into account.

Part of why you need to understand this stuff is because your Uranus and Pluto transits can combine to be anti-social. You may clash with others, and you may find yourself challenging various systems where politics is essential to follow. It’s therefore crucial that you understand any rule, whether you intend to break it or follow it. The experience of relating with and to structure needs to become a fully conscious process.

I would remind you again: this is not for the purpose of conforming to anyone or anything. This is intended to preserve your options and to ease your way forward. In terms of how you adapt, it’s necessary to understand what you transcend. Indeed, much of transcendence comes through understanding and awareness.

You cannot simply ‘go against the system’ to change it. You cannot go with it, either. For meaningful change to happen, and I mean this personally and collectively, you have to know what you’re doing; you have to know what situation you are trying to address.

On the most basic level, healthy politics means coming out of your own exclusive reality and really seeking understanding of the priorities of others, and working with them. It involves seeing where people are at, and factoring that in. It involves identifying common ground and building there.

The Necessity for Depth

To be effective in your own life under such intense astrology, making contact with your emotional presence is essential. It will serve as something that keeps you sensitive to the needs of others, as well as providing an ethical rudder for you.

Where there is upward movement in the chart (which there is, due to the presence of Pluto) grounding is necessary, and the source of your grounding is going to be in the direction of the sign Cancer, which is emotional.

Many factors in Cancer are calling you to embrace your emotional reality — and to stabilize it. You tend to run in fairly rapid emotional cycles, and you know that this presents challenges for you and for others. Therefore, tuning in to what you are feeling at any given time is a benefit to you and to the people with whom you associate. In times of change, and intense transits like you’re having, some aspect of your existence needs an anchor in stability.

Yet current transits in this house are calling for much more: one thing is true maturity, which means getting over any sense of inferiority or superiority that you have, and replacing it with a sense of belonging and willingness to participate.

Another factor is about going deeper into yourself than you think is necessary, and understanding the nuances of why you feel safe, or don’t feel safe, at any given time. This is the counterpart of understanding the politics of human interrelationships: understanding yourself.

About Money: The Adult Thing

Taking an adult position on the issue of finances is essential to your financial stability and prosperity. It’s still easy for you to revert to child mode, or to act on values that were more meaningful in your early life or family of origin. I suggest you be aware of what those values were; they might feel good for a time but they are not actually likely to serve you.

To this end, you need to discern wants from needs. Do not use the word ‘need’ lightly or casually; I suggest you save it for the basics: the roof over your head, healthy food to eat and dependable transportation. There’s no overestimating the extent to which the world economic crisis, and the personal crisis of many individuals, is based on violating this common-sense approach.

When you hear yourself say the word ‘need’ for something you already have, or something that serves no actual, practical purpose, I suggest you consider whether you’re lying to yourself, or making an excuse to have some form of extravagance or luxury. It can be challenging to say the word ‘want’ because it involves admitting to personal volition, and taking personal responsibility for a desire. If you can admit what you want, it will be easier (not harder) to acquire in a responsible way, and you will benefit from making sure that you take care of your needs first.

If you want to get your finances straight, and relate to others in business in a meaningful way, this is the first item on the agenda. Note that many businesses go under because the people spending the money confuse wants and needs.

The second thing to do is focus on getting out of debt, rather than deeper in. If you owe money, research the nature of the contract. Having a full understanding of all your contractual situations is critical. You want to know what is expected of you, what you can expect of others, and how the situation as it stands today is likely to develop over time.

These are all functions of Saturn in Scorpio, which is your 8th solar house if you have an Aries Sun, or your 8th house by whole-sign houses if you’re Aries rising. Note that while Saturn to most astrologers signifies ‘stuck’ or ‘blocked’, in my experience Saturn is about change, movement, progress and opportunity. There is direct potential for advancement in understanding contracts, and understanding how they develop over time.

On the problem-solving side, to give one example, understand what it means to make the minimum payment on credit cards. Most are designed so that the minimum keeps you paying interest forever; you make no progress getting out of debt. Discuss this with any credit card company (and make sure you get a supervisor on the phone if you’re not getting straight answers from the basic level of customer service). Find out exactly how long it will take to pay off the debt based on several different levels of consistent payment, for example, paying double or triple the minimum.

On the creative side, understand that all things take time to develop, particularly those that involve money. We live in an era with an ethos of ‘one must be rich immediately’, which doesn’t usually happen and often ends horribly when it does.

Wealth or even material value takes time to accumulate, and during that time, it’s necessary to be focused, vigilant and engage in responsible relationships. This is a time when it’s more important to reinvest in what you’re doing than it is to take out profits. For what purpose would you be taking them out, anyway? Wants, or needs?

Beware of Your Idealism

There are many factors in your astrology, in particular, a whole lot of Pisces in your chart at the moment the Sun ingresses Aries — and that means beware of your idealism. It’s essential to dream; it’s essential to have a vision for yourself; it’s essential to see what’s possible and push the limit.

It’s also necessary to temper your optimism and your enthusiasm with something that we don’t hear a lot about these days — pragmatism. A diversity of factors suggest that you may have big dreams and the sensation that anything is possible. You are right, though there are conditions on the possibilities manifesting; they will not happen by themselves and they will not happen ‘by accident’.

To stay in harmony with your environment and your own growth, it’s necessary to consider the practical needs, and the practical implications, of acting on any particular dream. In a word, you need temperance. There are so many variables, and so much volatility both in your mind and in the world around you, that pragmatism is your most meaningful boundary.

I learned in therapy to look up the meaning of any word I was unsure of. I know what pragmatic means in the ordinary sense of the word — we think of it as meaning practical. But I had a feeling there was more, so I looked it up in Etymology Online, my favorite dictionary site, since it gives the origin and history of words.

I was a little surprised by what I saw, as it fit this discussion so perfectly. The word dates from the 1540s, and it’s from Middle French, “pragmatique; from Latin, pragmaticus ‘skilled in business or law’; from Gk. pragmatikos, ‘versed in business’; from pragma (gen. pragmatos) ‘civil business, deed, act’; from prassein ‘to do, act, perform’.”

So it has several dimensions — one of which is skill, and another of which is acquiring knowledge, and another of which is taking action. I suggest you focus on each of those individually and then see what happens when you put them together. Don’t underestimate your lack of knowledge and skill. Do everything you can to build these things, and make sure that you put them into action when you arrive at a point of decision.

Remember that every dream has to be subjected to a test of pragmatism. Every idea needs to be questioned and evaluated on the basis of whether it’s useful (rather than say, the usual exclusive test of whether it will make money).

The Confidence Issue

Aries is famous for being brash and bold, yet lacking confidence. With a conjunction of Mars and Uranus in Aries the day the Sun ingresses there, that may be one of the most salient features of the coming year. Confidence is essential, particularly with the challenges that you face and the opportunities that you have, so this is an issue you have to work out.

Confidence is a misunderstood word; what it really means is to be trusting and to have faith in; in this case, trusting of yourself and having faith in yourself. I was going to write that this is not some mysterious thing, but actually, most of the time it does seem to be a persistent mystery for those who lack it. Yet the real mystery is knowing about the lack in the first place.

You cannot fake faith in yourself, or you cannot fake it for long. At a certain point you must make contact with the experience of being capable. There is a way to use logic to do this, and it’s something you might do with a pragmatic therapist. Know what you’ve achieved and know what adversity you have persisted through. Be conscious of the ways that you’ve gone against the odds in the past, and remember that you can do it again.

Perhaps the most significant ways to have faith in yourself is to remove the blocks to that faith, which is to say: know what they are, and where they came from, and then challenge them one by one.

I think for you, one of the most necessary elements of confidence is an understanding that your life is meaningful. In my notes, I had written, “making peace with the fact that your life is meaningful,” which is an interesting way to put it; the implication is that there’s not a lack of awareness but rather a kind of conflict over that potential meaning.

Actually that would not surprise me. You are seeking emotional grounding in your sense of meaning. That’s the thing to remember. Ultimately it will come as a feeling and not as a concept. It’s something you will know you have intuitively, and that you can tap into right now. Your existence is more than ‘important’.

The message your charts are conveying is that your feelings are relevant and you’re not subject to any other opinion, unless you consciously allow it to be so or take it on board.

Your desire to express yourself, to be adventurous and to be impulsive may seem to conflict with grounding; your experimental way of thinking may seem to conflict with a love of deep meaning. But it’s all part of the same process. You need to push boundaries to find out what they are. You need to go into unsafe territory to find out where your true safety resides.

Relationships are About Agreements

Let’s conclude with some thoughts about Saturn, which is the most influential planet in your relationships in these years. For the past few years, Saturn has been in your opposite sign Libra. This has been a kind of cleansing process in your relationships, holding them to a high standard of both functionality and maturity. You have, basically, been compelled to engage in your relationships in an adult way.

In some respects this has been a matter of finding balance. In other respects it was a matter of finding the present. Now with Saturn it’s about creating agreements that work for everyone.

To some extent this is an experiment, though you will be getting a lot of information over the coming seasons and that experiment can be an informed one, rather than random. The first step in this process is to understand who you’re getting into agreements with, and being aware of their motives and their tendencies.

I suggest you not expect people to change. Sometimes they do, but it’s not a realistic expectation: an honest person will tend to stay honest, and a dishonest person will tend to remain dishonest. And you will be subject to those tendencies.

Agreements need to be understood on the level of mutual benefit and mutual responsibility.

There is a powerful emphasis on Scorpio in your charts this year — your 8th solar house if you’re an Aries Sun and 8th house by whole-sign houses if you’re Aries rising. Where there is Scorpio and the 8th there is the theme of sex and sexuality. This is a reminder to do two things.

One is to make conscious agreements in your sexual relationships. All that matters is whether the agreements actually work for both people; and that they be conscious. Anything that is left to sink below the surface of awareness is likely to come back with a vengeance. Therefore, if you make clear-headed choices now, and if you honor the need for mutual consent, you will have an easier time of things when the astrology picks up intensity toward the end of the year.

Until then Saturn will be applying ever-increasing pressure to be clear with yourself and with partners, and to create situations that are honest, fair-minded and mutually beneficial.

If you practice self-disclosure, that is, fully expressing your actual desires, actions, feelings and history, you are opening the way to new potential. I suggest you gently or persuasively hold the people close to you to the same standard of disclosure. Or, before you get there, choose to be with honest people: people who actually say what they feel and what they want; people who are unafraid to tell you what they actually do, and what their expectations of you are.

It has been said that silence is golden, but at this time in your life, it would be fool’s gold. Therefore, listen, speak and pay attention to what you hear, what you say and most of all, notice what you and others actually do.

 

Eric also offers birthday readings and other audio reports here.

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Chart for the Vernal Equinox, the Sun’s ingress of Aries.

Handwritten chart for the Sun’s ingress of Aries.

List of minor and major planets in Aries at the Sun’s ingress.

List of minor planets in Libra, opposite Aries, at the Sun’s ingress of Aries.

90° sort of all planets in early cardinal signs at the Sun’s ingress of Aries.

4 Responses to Listen for Aries and Aries Rising

  1. ckaramolegos says:

    Once more, excellent work!

  2. As an Aries and a long time subscriber to PW I frequently get impatient waiting for the yearlys but they are ALWAYS worth the wait. This year especially! The psychological fear is that all this new found momentum is going to get ripped away somehow and I am going to have to start over again – again. I received tremendous validation and enthusiasm listening to Listen knowing that this trend is not only here but is going to continue to build and grow. THAT is what my intuition says too and THAT is what I follow. I wish I had a crystal ball and could see how it will work out – Listen is about as close as I can get to that in Truth. Excellent work Eric!!

  3. janet says:

    Thanks so much for such a thoughtful, generous, and insightful take. Astrology is an incredible but difficult tool. I appreciate so much your handling of it; your skill at teasing out the meaning and making the connections is something I trust.
    I’ve just finished listening to my Aries (sun) and Gemini (rising) readings. Wow! I’m piecing together the two into a semblance of a whole. The image is looking pretty good, now it’s looking back at me asking me the hard questions. Instinctually, I know I’m up for the task, I’ve shown myself that I’m up for the task, being told I’m up for the task assuages any lingering doubt. Okay, back to work! and by work I mean love.

  4. KarenM says:

    As an Aries with late Pisces rising, Uranus has been a strong influence in my life for some time now, along with the Pluto / 10th house influence. Eric, I have relied on your annuals for several years to help me navigate these intense transits. Your interpretations are spot on and I can feel the truth resonate as I read my sign interpretation. I have successfully been able to create change in my professional life rather than wait for it to happen to me. I’ve enjoyed being able to express creativity and vision at a time where most would say my profession (teaching) offers few opportunities for either. I have always been one to avoid the political aspects of my job. So, learning this skill is a new challenge I will face. But it feels right at this time. Thanks again for the wonderful guidance!

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