Let's examine further the Aries milieu of the Four Horsemen: when Christopher Hitchens fell in battle in 2011, contentious Aries-born philosopher A. C. Grayling had already been tagged 'Fifth Horseman'. Grayling has atheist and combat credentials: his heroic tirades "Against All Gods" and "The God Argument", and distinctive studies in belligerence: "The Quarrel of the Age", a biography of outspoken 19th century Aries atheist William Hazlitt (whose chef d'oeuvre is the boxing classic The Fight); and the deeply serious "Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan". Grayling is a feisty controversialist in his newspaper column, and, as First Master of New College of the Humanities, where both Dawkins and Dennett are on faculty, a much-attacked intellectual entrepreneur. As if to reconstitute an Aries Gang of Four, Grayling's other celebrity appointment to the New College faculty is the pugnacious war historian Niall Ferguson, b. April 18, 1964.
The godmother, the fiery Amazon among this angry posse is Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the infamous battle-ax, also an Aries and perhaps the first modern media atheist. A sociopath by any standard, she brutalized her family and embezzled her followers. She enjoyed employing ex-convicts, especially murderers, one of whom hacked her to bloody bits along with her son and grand-daughter, in 1995. An atheist martyr, perhaps.
Aries provides us an atheist who was literally a fighter: Jack Johnson, World Heavyweight Champion from 1908 to 1915, who was the first African-American to win the title and is shortlisted for 'greatest boxer ever'. Johnson was notorious for disrupting religious services in the South, seizing the pulpit to denounce the church's domination over black people's lives. A brawler outside the ring, who defiantly dated under-aged white women, Johnson pummeled the "Great White Hope" in 1913, triggering the first nation-wide outbreak of race riots. (Similarly,Rodney King triggered the 1992 race riots, and later did celebrity boxing matches, another Aries magnet for violence.)
Although macho Aries actors have taken many great boxing roles, we find no more Aries among the supreme pugilists (although I haven't checked the lighter weighs, and Aries tend to be compact). It is as if Aries excels in the talk and the representation of violence, the strength of intimidation and threat, rather than the thing itself. Or the swagger, as heard on boxing.com/forum.
Of course, you can be an atheist without brass knuckles or taking on all comers: most of us are. And Aries natives are not really fated to violence, though they may bear a few more scars than some. The domesticated, modern Ram is lively, active, direct, rarely timid and altogether commendable when self-regulated. As criminals, they're usually too impulsive to avoid jail.
SATANIC POETSAmong the major poets an outstandingly violent cousinage are Aries. Charles Baudelaire, Algernon Swinburne and Paul Verlaine, three closely related poets, brandished shocking blasphemies as part of a principled assault on conventional values. Baudelaire was an ardent reader of de Maistre; both took the hangman to be the world's true ruler. Swinburne was an ardent sado-masochist, obsessed with whipping and caning, but it was because of his outspoken atheism that he was denied the Poet Laureateship. Verlaine famously shot Rimbaud in the hand. He also physically assaulted his mother. The young dadaist Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautreamont, author of Maldoror, can be added to this group. All extended atheism in the direction of Satanism, for rhetorical effect. (So also atheist/satanist Anton LaVay was an Aries, with no supernatural beliefs, but quite violent.)
THE SWORD AND THE PHALLUSCommenting recently on the web, Maggie-from-Morristown expressed one popular take-away on Cartesian violence: "Never forget that at Descartes' feet we can lay the blame for the human/nature disconnect that has resulted in the general rape of the land, pollution of the oceans, horrific treatment of (other) animals, and a general derailing of the human's consciousness of his/her relation to the earth and everything else in it."
The operative term there is 'rape'. The symbolic identification of sword and phallus is longstanding. Among the egregiously phallocentric Aries we have: Pietro Aretino, the great Renaissance pornographer/adventurer; theEarl of Rochester, the obscene Restoration poet and, according to Grayling, "harvester of maidenheads". (Continually drunk for a decade, Rochester committed two my-bads, boxing a man's ear in front of the King, and trashing the King's fabulous glass astronomical models, for fun); Giacomo Casanova, celebrated seducer; Wilhelm Reich, the Freudian who proposed great orgasms as a panacea; Jacques Lacan, notorious seducer and phallosopher; Hugh Hefner, Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty and many others in the front lines of the battle against sexual repression.
Dropping from high culture to low (in astrology's disarming way): Take note the run of Aries natives who popularly represent life-philosophies centered on combat and force: Eugene Sandow, the first bodybuilder, kung-fu master Jackie Chan, black-beltSteven Seagal, samurai Toshiro Mifune, 'Gladiator' Russell Crowe, 'Iron Man' Robert Downey Jr., Amazon warrior Lucy Lawless. Mayhem-meister Quentin Tarantino confesses: "Violence is one of the most fun things to watch."
CODAThe philosopher, John Gray, is an Aries, and an atheist, but too sophisticated and independent to join the Horsemen. In fact he is their mordant critic. But his Aries metal gleams; he is a Hobbesian for whom humans are "weapon-making animals with an unquenchable fondness for killing". At Wikipedia: "Gray sees volition, and hence morality, as an illusion, and portrays humanity as a ravenous species engaged in wiping out other forms of life."
Recently Gray grappled horns with his always overheated fellow Aries Slavoj Zizek over the subject of Zizek's 2008 book, "Violence: Six Sideways Reflections". Flirting with the terrible glamor of violence, Zizek inflates the meaning of the word to include the metaphorical and metaphysical, systemic, capitalist, objective, subjective, divine, etc., suggesting that revolutionary bloodshed is merely one, perhaps salutary or necessary or even minor manifestation of the order of violence in which we exist.
I haven't come to a decision on atheism. There's so much to read. Really, I find astrology mysterious enough; God is way beyond me. But the Horsemen and their devoted fanboys are such disagreeable, self-satisfied dogmatists, and invariably skeptics to boot, deploying their Hobbesian clubs "against idealistic opponents whenever they might emerge". All of them continually subject astrology to knee-jerk abuse. I'm forced to take my advantage when it presents itself, as now. I could not allow the remarkable trifecta of four Horsemen's birthdays under Aries go unnoticed or unintelligible.
In the atheist/skeptic community the very term "astrology" is synonymous with "nonsense". What I present here is purely empirical, but evades statistical analysis, calls upon our subjective everyday freedom to weigh probability and seek causes, a contemplative rather than active occupation, and not for everyone.
Some like to imagine that occult influences have played a dark role in history. I don't know about that, but it appears that a cabal of Aries types, a cultus devoted to Mars, is beating drums, which should alert us to simplistic thinking about the Other, wherever we hear it. No matter how convincingly Aries may argue that primitive force is unanswerable, the civilizing Zodiac eternally offers, in principle, fully eleven further successive stages of development to acknowledge . . . . so long as Aries swords are sheathed.
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