Aries is utterly simple, the Fool of the Zodiac; the first sign in the cycle, blunt, direct, straight from the chest. Aries says, I want what I want and I want it NOW Goddammit!!

Aries doesn’t care about complicated things like love or beauty or art or the mechanics of day-to-day survival. Aries is consumed by a monumental, focused passion, the will to exist. That’s all. Not ‘to exist freely’, or ‘well’ or ‘comfortably’. Simply to exist.

Aries wants what it wants, and it should get to have it. Think about it! All Aries wants is to exist. That is in the best interest of everybody. Aries is not naturally warlike, merely insistent, indomitable and unconquerable.

Aries is no one’s slave, and it’s impossible to kill. Knock it down, it jumps back up again. War is caused by Aries’ struggle to exist against the forces that seek to suppress it. End the suppression and all is well.

Taurus, well Taurus is a little bit more complex. Not much, but some. Taurus wants to touch, to have, to hold. Taurus wants to feel solid, to feel real–to BE real. Taurus is the feeling of solidity, of useful hands, strong body. Taurus is stolid, simple, secure.

Taurus doesn’t really know love, either; just comfort, sensation, security. Taurus doesn’t worry or try hard, Taurus just has it. And Taurus is BIG. Taurus is the whole world. Taurus is Big Momma and how it feels to be safe in her lap. Taurus is gentle breezes and warm sun on skin, dappled shade and baby lambs. Taurus is growth and flowering.

Taurus doesn’t think about much, or care either. Taurus doesn’t look for meaning or shadows behind the picture. Everything is taken at face value as far as Taurus is concerned, what you see, sense, touch, be is what you get.

Meanwhile Gemini is looking around and checking it all out. Gemini has no agenda, just curiosity. Gemini seeks but has no object. Gemini is friendly and interested, but Gemini doesn’t know love; Gemini is too busy looking and noticing, perceiving and thinking.

Gemini is a little more complicated, but still pretty simple. It’s made up of visual input, a data control center, and constant attention to new things, new input, new experiences, and new people to wonder about and be amazed by.

Gemini can get confused, though it doesn’t care much about the confusion or try to understand it. It simply revels in the information overload, jittered up with spirally eyes in front of the mind’s television, in its glory.

Then all of a sudden things get a lot deeper and more complicated, and here comes Cancer with a bunch more information in the form of memory.

Here are old emotions that seem to be about something, images that slowly rise to consciousness, bringing with them riptides, ebbing flows of emotion, bubbles of association, impressions, deep, ancient, implacable, and frighteningly personal.

Cancer says, these feelings are about ME, this pain is ME, I am hurting. I was hurting, I am hurting.

Cancer is a deep place but warm and somehow nourishing. Somehow we grow. Still we do not know love, but somehow we feel nurtured, held, safe.

We feel, we cry, we are filled, then we feel good.

And here comes Leo, feeling hot, shining with its creative light, radiant, as fearless as Cancer was fearful, as bright as Cancer was dark.

Leo, sunchild, does not know love either, but knows attention and wants it, knows light and shines it, knows fun and has it. Somehow, mysteriously, Leo creates, makes beauty from a source beyond itself. Creative magic, more complex now, prismatic, multilayered, bright.

Leo, too, is big, big and hot as the sun itself, shining a pure and bright source light that illuminates it from inside and makes everything seem so very easy. Leo is compelling, charismatic, eminently watchable.

But eventually even Leo must fall to earth; the pieces must be picked up and placed in their proper order.

Now, complexity reaches a peak in Virgo. Here everything has a meaning, everything is organized, everything has a function, and Virgo strives to know them all. Virgo is competent, efficient, and Virgo knows complexity.

The finest dancing particles in Virgo are conscious. Each must choose its part in the endless dance, until the parts fuse and become one, a seamless whole, integrated, perfect. But Virgo is confused. It lacks the tools to analyze and order the infinitude of stuff that its world is made from. There is too much, it is too alone.

Virgo is incomplete, imperfect, and the perfection it strives so diligently for eludes it endlessly. In despair it surrenders, it releases its claim to identity, it sacrifices itself for love.

Libra is reborn and life is simple again, but now Libra know love as something to be desired more than existence itself, and it longs for love, it aspires.

Libra calls for love with all its heart, and if love responds, it will choose to live, but if love does not respond, then pain and conflict arises.

This is the first conflict, for Libra is the first sign of relationship and Aries, its opposite and polarity, is its right and only possible partner. Aries primary drive is to exist no matter what, and it still does not know, nor desire, nor value love.

Remember, Aries values only self, and Libra has a dilemma, doomed to love selflessly the selfish, doomed to give to the taker, unless magic happens and Aries gives back.

Then fusion takes place, the sperm surrenders to the egg, new life is fertilized, the next cycle is begun.

But if love does not come, if desire is not fulfilled, then death comes to the virgin self.

The first time through the cycle, death is what happens, for Aries is a slow learner, and along comes Scorpio feeling the depth of suffering, the poison fangs of Fate calling us into a Hell which we thought we’d escaped.

Here, we burn for eternity, we flame in the blazing agony and glory of all our denied power, awaiting the day in which we may become all of ourselves, when all this power and pain we are victim to shall become us and heal our flesh beyond death.

While here, we learn to swim the seas of suffering, we learn to feel masses of pain beyond our personal portion, for Scorpio’s territory, like Taurus’ and Leo’s, is BIG. Too big for Scorpio to handle, ultimately. Too big to survive.

Scorpio can’t believe in, rejects the ground underfoot, the offering of its opposite self and safety-net, Taurus.

Scorpio instead appeals to God for salvation, and along comes Sagittarius the expansive, the mind of Spirit.

And here Sagittarius relaxes into its warmth and joviality, revels in its place in the whole, and accepts God’s word that all will be well. From somewhere it receives a constant flow of information, data, input from the world, coming from its opposite self, its partner in Gemini, but the first time around it pays little attention to this information.

Information, after all, is irrelevant for faith, and Sagittarius knows everything, for Sagittarius has universal connections. Sagittarius knows the meaning of existence and it sees no need or purpose for the data that streams through its awareness.

And now Capricorn, sign of duty, taking responsibility for paying the debt accrued through Sagittarius’s excesses, for Capricorn takes responsibility for everything.

Capricorn seeks to escape its terrible vulnerability, is besieged by a constant influx of impressions and emotions from the dark recesses of its own memory. And so Capricorn must create structures to separate itself from its own opposite self, Cancer.

Capricorn sells itself into slavery in return for a safe life bound by predictable laws of birth, death, and karma and it think it is the will of God but it is only guilt and the fear it is suppressing that it serves here.

Capricorn builds walls and cities, it serves the social organism and worships it as God, it carves graven images of rule and law and calls Deity.

Then like a bolt of lightning, Aquarius strikes, and it names God ‘dead’ and the universe a democracy. Aquarius create its own Godhead, in which everybody is equal and no one is any better than any other.

Aquarius has a guillotine and it knows how to use it. Down come the elite, down come the aristocrats, including its own Leo opposite self. Aquarius exalts lofty systems of philanthropy and denial, and it casts down its own idols, pretensions and self.

Aquarius has Big Ideals, as big as the cosmos, and it has little patience for the petty details of existence. It tinkers and innovates and invents better mousetraps, until it accidentally touches something that kills it, and everything else too.

Now everything is dead in Pisces, the dreamworld, afterlife, stray fey fairyland, where nothing is real and everything is permitted, and Pisces drowns in confusion and memory, where it feels everything and heals nothing; it thrashes and cries and re-experiences it all but understands nothing.

From somewhere, Pisces becomes dimly aware of a universe of potential, of infinitely tiny quantum particles quivering to create something solid and real, and it allows itself to hope for escape from its solitude. It allows itself to desire life.

It floats endlessly in eternity, gathering its momentum, focusing on its precious, tiny seed particle of potential, allowing its Virgo other self to do its work organizing the potential into possibility until, here it comes, the cycle begins again and here is:

Aries. Born again, with a little more awareness than before, a little more availability, a little more readiness to open to love. Born again with a little more intention to rectify its past mistakes, to do it over again right, and so very grateful for this fresh opportunity to live.

And now here is Libra, inside Aries, beside it, part of it, eternally beloved, giver and taker, in-breath and out-breath, right and left ventricles of a single balanced heart working harmoniously together.

Now the whole picture springs into existence, complete and perfect, as though a key has clicked open a lock and the gateway to paradise has swung wide.

And that’s how it should be, and will be, and is.

This cycle has happened to each of us, in each of us, many many times. We have lived through endless spiraling loops of this path, recreated the tragedies and triumphs, the joys and agonies, remembered and forgotten over and over again. Perhaps the final stage of the cycle is upon us. So mote it be. Every moment provides a new opportunity.