Aries New Moon: Terrible Love of War

Note: I recently moved my website, and still have not gotten the chance to convert several years worth of articles. Hopefully the best of the best will reappear on this site in the near future. AND I have high hopes that I’ll get back to writing more regularly. Just wanted to give that a little shout out in case you were wondering why the available writings here are few and… well, dated.

This Aries New Moon’s got me thinking about war. What follows are some meandering thoughts.

During the 5600 years of written history, 14,600 wars have been recorded. That’s 2 or 3 wars every year over that time period. That number is somewhat out of date - I took it from a book by James Hillman called A Terrible Love of War, published in 2004. Which was apparently almost 20 years ago.

The other day, I saw an article in the New York Times that said something like: “What is it like to be back at war after so many years of relative peace?”

What? I guess they’re relying heavily on the “relative” part?

This was followed by my scrolling past an article announcing that the war in Yemen has been going on for 8 years. I mentioned that to a partner. They said they didn’t know there was a war in Yemen.

I did a google search: There are 10 official wars and 8 active military conflicts recognized by the United States right now. There are also other violent conflicts involving 64 countries and 576 militias and separatist groups.

My mom never let me watch violent movies when I was growing up. She was okay with sexuality and some level of sex, but violence was off the menu. I understood her thinking: she didn’t want me to become desensitized to violence and believed that there was such a thing as age-appropriate exposure.

Over the years, I heard many claim that desensitization via media was impossible or unimportant, but to this day I am grateful that watching violence impacts me. My reaction reminds me of my humanity and my desire to do work that contributes to a world not constantly at war. I don’t want to be okay with violence.

But still. So much psychic numbing, even in my own noggin. We don’t even have the tools to cope with a world so persistently at war.

What do we crave about war? The explosions? The power plays? The meaning? It is common for soldiers returning from battle to say it was the most meaningful time of their lives. Our culture eroticizes “men in uniform.” And yet… we can think of what happened when veterans returned from Viet Nam. They became scapegoats for collective projection: we don’t like to admit we love war. We feel guilt and shame about what that means. That inner turmoil gets even worse without ‘victory.’ And so we project. Just look at flippin’ football games.

We uplift soldiers… and yet Veterans are among the most marginalized among us.

An episode of Black Mirror comes to mind. Soldiers in a war have a chip implant that makes them see opponents as monsters and zombies. Like they’re fighting in a video game. One day, a chip malfunctions. The soldier realizes they’re killing humans. An awakening.

So much of modern war embraces if not relies on the impersonal: a man behind a console pushing a button; cyber war; selling or sending arms to countries far away.

To interact with war is to interact with the mythological world. A world of deities and unimaginable feats and tragedies. Mythological proportions of soldiers can die in one day. Entire cities are wiped out. What do we do with that? It is hard to metabolize the potentials of another world at war.

I’m reminded of that quote attributed to Robert Oppenheimer, a scientist involved with the Manhattan Project. He said, “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds,” in reference to his work developing the first nuclear bomb.

In my graduate program, I studied the psychology of apocalypse. A primary focus was the history of nuclear energy. And indeed, one of the scientists is on record discussing what it was like to calculate probabilities: what was the probability that the atmosphere directly over the detonation site would be scorched? What was the probability that the area over the region would be scorched? What about the entire atmosphere?**

I thought long and hard about the detachment that would be required to field such inquiries as a matter of scientific hypothesis. There are times in our lives where we have to be detached from our humanity — whether through conscious choice or trauma.

This is where the more initiatory elements of the cardinal cross become fixed. We see here the constant questions of the fixed polarities: how do I bring my godliness into connection with my humanity (Leo/Aquarius)? How do I cope with cycles of life and death and the extreme reactions I have to being powerless to stop the inevitability of my death (Taurus/Scorpio)?

What mythologies help us understand our terrible love of war? Ares and Aphrodite had an illicit love affair. The aggression and passion of Ares captures Aphrodite’s imagination, making him an ideal lover. Super simplistically speaking, we see that the passion and fire of war has a place in bed with erotic energy.

From Hillman’s book, listing Ares epithets:

“Androphones (killer of men), aides (destroyer), miaphonos (murderer), brotoloigos (fatal to mortals), and kraters (mighty; brutally, supernaturally powerful). Others are: tharsos (audacity, courage), lussa (rabid), mens (life force; fierce passion, battle rage) … we find they cover precisely the inhumanity we have been witnessing, which is un-understandable without the superhuman meaning of “inhuman.” The violence of Ares krateros is a sacred violence because authorized by its inhuman proponent and ritualized in the altered states of the battlefield which ‘displays the conjunction of good and bad violence within the sacred.’ 'Ares is no less divine for being cruel and brutal.’ Battlefield as place of sacrifice; participation in a sacrament. The whole bloody business reveals a god, therewith placing war among the authentic phenomena of religion. And that is why war is so terrible, so loved, and so hard to understand.”

The society I live in glorifies war at the same time as it asks us to repress and subvert our anger and stormier emotions. When we banish Mars — our aggression, our urge to fight (and to fuck, really), there are a whole host of symptoms and inadequately activated psychic potentials that become distorted.* In astrology we can think of this as the square between Aries and Capricorn - the repression of instinctive energies by way of social codes and contracts. But what is repressed always erupts.

War as an act of offense is Wrong. Unless we side with the aggressor. Was as an act of defense is commendable and understandable. Unless the defendants have brown skin or are religiously righteous. Overarching generalizations there. But true.

Something about war stirs us… and yet there is ambivalence, too. The instinct to fight for life is a core part of our journey into this world. We arrive through the birth canal, being propelled by contractions. Birth is violent and gory in that it involves tearing, pushing, screaming, grunting, blood, feces. Psychologically speaking, we associate zodiacal Aries with the courage it takes to be born again — raw life force and instinct coming into form.

We live in a time when war has been normalized in so many ways. Trade war. Gender war. Information war. Civil wars. In countries, sure. But also against cancer. Drugs. Poverty. We mobilize resources. We send out the cavalry.

We fight for our rights. To horde toilet paper. To get adequate medical care. So much fight.

But, as Hillman says, “To declare war ‘normal’ does not eliminate the pathologies of behavior, the enormities of devastation, the unbearable pain suffered in bodies and souls. Nor does the idea that war is normal justify it.” Our society also, after all, declares war a last resort.

And my oh my the relationship we have with anger.

I remember my own prices of coming to terms with the way anger lives inside of me. Initially, my responses to my own anger were dissociative: I would become silent. Like a spaciousness in my head began to consume all that I was. Anger was so foreign to me, as it was previously immediately consumed by grief and tears, that I didn’t know what to do with it at all.

As I began to understand and claim my anger, I became adept at existing within it. I could recognize its physiological features: shorter breath, pounding heart. I could recognize the more archetypal parts of me that would surface: the wrath-queen; the tyrant; the hexing Sorceress. And I could feel the child part of me who just wanted to have room to emote while at the same time being scared to death that others would leave as a result.

But there was such power in being able to observe all of these different parts and still have the presence of mind to communicate. The first time I got into a fight with a lover where I was able to remain grounded in my anger and hold a conversation about it rather than fly into a fit of clinginess and don’t-leave-me-style sobbing grief, the lover let me know that the presence of my anger was inappropriate, violent, wrong and juvenile. I recognized that they were attempting to express their own need to claim safe space by trying to control me. But I felt powerful, confident and honestly a little thrilled that I was able to just be angry and not brush it aside. I also inherently trusted my ability to be angry and yet do no harm.

When anger is made conscious and welcomed as a part of a natural way of being, it can be perceived as an act of violence. It upsets the balance of the social code and the roles we — particularly women — are asked to play (think square between Capricorn and Libra). Sometimes even just having the tenacity to follow one’s path in this life takes a war like energy.

I know that as unimaginable as war is, part of our task to undoing our perpetual affair with it has to do with imagining. And understanding. I wonder about the place of this Aries New Moon with Mercury in the mix as a focal point for that, and how the Jupiter-Mars conjunction in Aries this May might reflect these themes. I think about how much Pisces we have rolling towards us now, a tidal wave of imagination. I see the hopeful elements, and juiced up capacity for connection, empathy and ultimately compassion. I see the less desirable possibilities as well.

I don’t believe that war is inherent to the human species. We go back too far for that. But perhaps it can become that way. Maybe it already has. I just don’t know.

(I do post more personalized ritual guidance and astrobabble for each New Moon as part of my Patreon campaign. You can subscribe for as low as $5/month to gain access to that and other goodies — or just subscribe to post my work. Check out this month’s version here.

One on one sessions are available here. I love working with people.)

*Thank you to episode 179 of The Jungian Podcast (The Archetype of War)

**See: Dreaming the End of the World: Apocalypse as a Rite of Passage by Michael Ortiz Hill