Free Will Astrology: Aries
Love Oracles to Liberate Your Imagination
This collection of Love Oracles to Liberate Your Imagination is a tender and rowdy guide to understanding and embodying the Aries energy—offering oracles, insights, and provocations to help Aries natives, their allies, and anyone who aspires to cultivate courage, candor, and daring.
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In tis book, the reader communes with an extended love letter to Aries souls: the pathfinders, groundbreakers, and adventurers who charge headfirst into life’s challenges and triumphs.
The oracles and anecdotes found here are also designed for those who love Aries people and want to know them better. Whether you’re in a passionate relationship with an Aries or you count them as your allies, this book is a guide to understanding their fierce hearts, bold impulses, and boundless energy.
But it doesn’t stop there. This book is also meant for anyone who carries strong Aries placements in their personal chart — Mars or Moon or Ascendant in Aries, for example. If you harbor a longing to unleash your inner warrior, to tap into the dynamic, high-octane force that propels Aries forward, this book will help you unlock that potential. It’s a toolkit for cultivating the courage, daring, and radical authenticity that Aries energy demands.
And for those of us who aren’t born with Aries planets but feel the call to activate and express the sign’s vigorous, boundary-pushing energy, my book is a blueprint for channeling Aries energy into your life. It’s an invitation to take smart risks, to recognize your fear but overcome it, and to play with the fire that can warm and purify.
In short, whether you’re a dedicated Aries, an ardent admirer, or this book offers the wisdom, the wit, and the wildness you need to explore the further frontier.
A martial arts competition on ESPN TV featured a fierce dance-off, in which rivals took turns brandishing their high-octane warrior choreography.
At one point, the announcer waxed poetic as the eventual winner pulled off a seemingly impossible move: “And that was a corkscrew illusion twist rodeo spin!”
I invite you to use that phrase as an incantatory invocation in the regular pep talks you have with yourself.
Ask yourself now and then, “What will be my next version of the Corkscrew Illusion Twist Rodeo Spin?”
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If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.
—Aries author and mythologist Joseph Campbell
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British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) had an unusual fetish. He enjoyed eating apples, pears, and other fruits while they were still hanging on the tree.
Why? Maybe because the taste was as pure and brisk as it could possibly be—an experience that I imagine would be important to a romantic poet like him.
In accordance with your astrological potentials, I suggest you periodically use Coleridge’s quest for ultimate freshness as a driving metaphor.
Go to the source to obtain what you need. Dispense with intermediaries. Be as fresh and raw as the law allows.
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To educate and animate others, reveal the raw truth about yourself.
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I saw my Aries friend Alexis in the grocery store. “You are even more festive than the last time I saw you,” I told her.
She was wearing red silk pants, a burgundy cashmere sweater, silver scarf, black snakeskin boots, and beaded black tunic.
A cascade of three necklaces hung from her neck: one of rubies, another of pearls, a third of arrowheads.
I noticed three new piercings and earrings in her right ear (white stones engraved with the alchemical symbols for calcination, congelation, and putrefaction), and a red dot on her forehead just above her nose.
She also happened to be carrying her snake named Esmerelda, which coiled around her left arm.
“The older I get, the freer I am to hide nothing about how I really feel,” she replied. “It’s not even rebellion anymore—it’s generosity. I have a sense that the world needs me to express my most extravagant self.”
I nominate Alexis to be one of your patron saints.
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The path the ancestors bushwhacked is overgrown, unused. The other path, smooth and broad, is crowded with travelers. It goes nowhere.
There’s a third path: mine. Before me, no one. Behind me, no one. Alone, I find my way.
—Aries poet Octavio Paz, adapted from the Sanskrit
The above message, formulated by Octavio Paz, is an apt attitude for you to consider adopting. But it’s a bit too serious and bombastic for my tastes. I hope you implement its advice with playful joy and blithe amusement.
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“He in his madness prays for storms, and dreams that storms will bring him peace,” wrote Leo Tolstoy in his novella The Death of Ivan Ilych.
Now and then, this strategy works for you. The tempests you activate through the sparkle of your longing may clear away your emotional congestion, zap your angst, and usher you into a period of dynamic peace.
But here is a key inquiry: Is your intuition reliable? Does it accurately tell you when it’s better to forswear the storm and when, on the other hand, to risk being gusty, blustery, and turbulent?
As an Aries, you have the potential to develop an acute intuition like this.
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All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you.
—Aries author and mythologist Joseph Campbell
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“I am in continuous pursuit of the color red,” wrote artist Andy Goldsworthy. His specialty is creating large outdoor sculptures made of natural objects.
“As I approach the source of the color red, the more I understand it,” he tells us. That’s why he is fond of red rocks, whose hue comes from iron, the same element that makes our blood red.
One of your potentially enjoyable tasks, Aries, is to be like Goldsworthy: Develop an intimate and expansive relationship with red.
Why? There’s no need to be logical about it. In your case, an irrational urge for communion with red may be honest medicine.
(But I will mention that color therapists say red inspires vigor, zeal, determination, and longing.)