EMERGING ARCHETYPAL THEMES:
The Hunger Games
The Female Hero: Uranus in Aries: The Courage to Be Yourself
By
Cathy
Pagano
Aries, considered the first sign of the Zodiac, begins when the Sun comes north of the equator at Spring Equinox. When the Sun resumes its journey here in the north each year, we experience a new beginning, a return of green, growing life. Many religious holidays celebrate this season as a time of new life, of Resurrection and Freedom. The reverse is true of our friends south of the equator. They've just celebrated the harvest and the coming death of the year at Autumn Equinox as the Sun moves away from their southern homelands.
Just as the sign of Aries starts the astrological year, the energy of Aries is all about new beginnings and a new sense of identity. Aries' energy is energizing, exciting, driven, self-confident and enthusiastic. Aries are the explorers, the pioneers, the scouts, and the leaders of the Zodiac.
And this year, Aries carries a primal spark of lightning, because the planet Uranus is moving through the early degrees of Aries. Uranus symbolizes the energy of awakening, of innovation, of rebellion and originality. In the sign of Aries, Uranus is energizing us with a new sense of ourselves, an awakened sense of ourselves, as if we've been hit by a lightning bolt. With its square to Pluto in Capricorn coming up, the call to discover a new identity includes using that new identity to help recreate our society.
This sense of quickening is accelerated when an archetypal story helps give this new energy a structure to coalesce around. A story gives meaning to what we're doing, as well as providing clues on how to "pass the tests' of the issues being raised. The Aries quest is that of being true to your original Self. We are here at this moment in our history to meet the challenges and deal with the issues facing our world, and we will need to find the hero and heroine within ourselves. Uranus in Aries can inspire us to find and embrace our archetypal identity.
So this month's blog is about one of the Aries lessons that help us discover our true identities. This is the lesson of finding the courage and self-confidence to be ourselves, even under fire.
The Hunger Games
I was delighted to discover that the movie version of The Hunger Games was almost as good as the book. I chose it as my example of Aries' courage and self-confidence because its main character, Katniss Everdeen, is a beautiful example of a young woman finding the courage to meet her destiny and the self-confidence to do it in a truly feminine way.
For those of you who don't know the story, Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games is about a possible future when America is controlled by the wealthy few who control the rest of the country. One way they do this is by making teenagers from each of the 12 provinces participate in a yearly lottery which sends two of them -- a boy and a girl -- to fight to the death in a televised event called The Hunger Games, which combines the cruelty of our wars with our sick fascination for reality TV shows.
Our heroine, Katniss becomes one of the contestants when she volunteers to take her younger sister's place in the lottery. The story contains some interesting social commentary on our present society: the ruthless power-plays of government by the rich, the waste of our collective creativity on irrelevant social fads, the narcissistic cruelty of a rich and bored society which can fully enjoy the suffering and death of others while warmly loving their own children.
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