Aries 14º: A serpent coiling near a man and a woman.

15:41, 04.06.2015, Aries 15º (late posting)

pp. 59-60     AN ASTROLOGICAL MANDALA, by Dane Rudhyar (1973)

PHASE 14 (ARIES 14º): A SERPENT COILING NEAR A MAN AND A WOMAN.

KEYNOTE: Identification in bipolar relationship with the impersonal rhythm of natural energy.

The symbol for Phase 4 pictures a man and a woman in love walking together. At this new and more mentally stimulated level of experience and consciousness, a third factor appears: the serpent, whose coiling represents the spiral-like process of evolution—not merely "sex" according to the maker of cathartic symbols, Sigmund Freud. We can understand this "triangular" image—man, woman and the serpent—if we relate it to the preceding one in the series, the unexploded bomb of the anarchist or activist. The urge to blow up some structure which somehow has become in the activist's mind a symbol of the Establishment—the ruling elite—is usually the protest of an alienated and often immature mind that refuses relationship, because in the relationship he would occupy a subservient position. In this symbol, the serpent represents the acceptance of relationship by the two polarized human beings.

There must be a polarization before there can be fulfillment. The tragedy of so many contemporary lives is that, having become sharply individualized, the men and women cannot find their truly matching polar-opposite. Because they are not fulfilled at the root level of human emotions and vitalistic forces, they pass their lives seeking the ideal complement, often glamorized as the "soul mate." This search can find its expression at several levels. At the mystical level we have the examples of the "spiritual marriage of Saint Francis of Assisi and Santa Clara, or recently of Sri Aurobindo and Mother Mira.

The Adam and Eve story (in Hebrew, Ish and Isha—much more significant names!) refers to this principle of polarization, although the story has been turned upside down by priestly intellects to serve their purposes. Adam and Eve accepted the Presence, not of the Tempter, but of the Individualizer, who sought to have them born out of the womb of unconscious passivity to Nature's God. But the result of the experience frightened them. The "hid"; they failed in the great test of individualization, and in this sense the archetype of that failure is deeply imbedded in man's generic unconscious. It is repeated time after time.

Modern "individuals" are confronted with another test, but they do not understand its meaning. It is the test of polarized conscious participation in the evolutionary process—a polarization that could dissolve alienation, isolation and egocentricity. In a sense at least, this was the old Tantric concept in India; but today many young people accept the concept only superficially and miss its real essence. They cannot understand the meaning of entering into the serpent, i.e. of developing eonic consciousness and that transpersonal living which once was characterized by the words: Not I live, but Christ lives me—Christ, whose symbolic number in Gnosticism is 888.

At this fourth stage of the third five-fold sequence, we are confronted with an image suggesting the transpersonal way to the "cosmification" of desire and the conscious acceptance of polarization as the solution of the problems generated by individualization. But this need not mean what is currently meant by "sex" and the glorification of the orgasm. It implies rather the RITUALIZATION OF RELATIONSHIP.