In the span of just a couple of days, some of us may have gone from feeling a bit water-logged and fatigued, and even victim-y, to rushing forward with a new burst of energy.
This is the shift from watery Pisces (associated with the Moon card in tarot) to fiery Aries (associated with the Emperor card).
115 years ago, at the beginning of another Aries season, a literal fire destroyed a garment factory in New York City.
The roof exit was blocked that day, a common practice at the time, for fear that workers would steal or take unauthorized breaks.
Frances Perkins, who happened to be visiting New York City that day, was an eyewitness to this fire, which came to be known as the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Her journalist friend Will Irwin said, “What Frances Perkins saw that day started her on her career.”
Twenty-two years after that fire, Perkins became Labor Secretary under President Franklin Roosevelt, and is the reason the United States has Social Security and many other programs. She said “just fifty people could make a difference. She would act on this theory again and again, each time planting herself in the middle of the circle of fifty” (p. 53, The Woman Behind the New Deal).
Reflecting on Frances Perkins and her groups of 50 brought to mind the recent essay by Charles Duhigg about the importance of organizing instead of focusing mostly on mobilizing. Mobilizing is great for getting people to do something specific. Organizing “is about getting people to become the kind of people who do what needs to be done.”
Perkins understood instinctively what Jung articulated, “Individuation does not shut one out from the world, but gathers the world to oneself” ( On the Nature of the Psyche).
Neptune and Saturn recently left their long term stay in Pisces and have moved on to Aries. It’s tempting to celebrate this shift to a more energetic, individuation-focused sign and be done with Pisces already.
But then I think of Perkins. Saturn, Mercury, Jupiter, and the Sun were all in Aries when Perkins was born, and possibly the Moon, too, if she was born in the early morning. It’s obvious how those symbolic mirrors in Aries reflect the passion and energy she had to be a catalyst for substantial change.
Yet Venus was in Pisces when she was born. She had a “deep mystical streak common in many very religious people” and once said that she “saw people’s auras, allowing her to target those worthy of cultivation.” This “sixth sense” is what would help her bring those groups of fifty people together. “It gave her an uncanny ability to spot people of unusual promise before they were widely recognized by others” (p. 26).
Maureen Murdock reframes the heroic quest as relational and collective. “The heroic quest is not about power over, about conquest and domination” but strives instead to bring balance through the marriage of the masculine and feminine aspects of our nature (The Heroine’s Journey).
Aries might find us normally making haste. But Saturn asks us to tend the fire rather than be consumed by it—to move with purpose, rather than urgency. To plant ourselves in our own circle of fifty and to make haste slowly. Together.
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