Aries in astrology: Mars, the exalted Sun, decans

Ptolemy counts Aries among the two equinoctial signs (Tetrabiblos, book I, chapter 11): when the Sun enters its first degrees, night and day are of equal length. William Lilly, in Christian Astrology (1647), book I, in the chapter on the nature of the twelve signs, describes it as a masculine, diurnal, movable, cardinal and equinoctial sign, hot and dry, choleric, “the diurnal house of Mars”, of the fiery triplicity and of the East. A little earlier he explains the word cardinal: the four quarters of the year are made to begin with the Sun's entry into Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn.

Aries shares Fire with Leo and Sagittarius: the element of drive and enthusiasm. Being cardinal, it launches more than it consolidates; making things last will be the work of Taurus, a fixed sign. Its symbol, the animal that charges head first, says the essential.

You run on instinct and nerve. An idea crosses your mind and you want to make it real at once; you say what you think and you jump in where others are still hesitating. Your strengths: courage, initiative, plain frankness, an energy that carries others along and the ability to start again from scratch without bitterness. Your blind spots: impatience, skipped steps, an impulsiveness that hurts without meaning to, and trouble finishing what you started with so much fire.

In love, you like the conquest, the thrill of the beginning, intensity; routine puts you out fast. Your sincerity is your best asset: people always know where they stand with you. The trap would be to mistake the heat of the start for the depth of the bond. At work, you are a starter: a stalled project gets moving again with you. Entrepreneurship, sport, sales, emergencies and leading in the field suit you; slow, hierarchical structures wear you down. Your lesson: finish what you launch, and turn your sprinting energy into endurance.

Four planets have a dignity or a debility in this sign, and your report flags them in the Dignity column of the positions table.

• Mars, in domicile. AstralPro uses the modern rulerships: Mars rules Aries alone. Tradition gave it two houses; Lilly calls Aries its day house and Scorpio its night house, in his chapter on Mars. Ptolemy links this pair to the square these signs make with the houses of the luminaries, in keeping with the nature of Mars (Tetrabiblos, I, 17).
• Venus, in detriment. Aries faces Libra, one of her two domiciles. Lilly uses this very example to explain detriment: Venus in Aries “is in a sign opposite to one of her own houses”. Tradition and modern rulerships agree here.
• The Sun, in exaltation. Ptolemy (I, 19) grounds it in the season: in Aries the Sun moves into the northern semicircle, and both the length of the day and its heat begin to grow. Lilly specifies the 19th degree; the AstralPro engine reads the exaltation across the whole sign.
• Saturn, in fall. For Ptolemy, Saturn takes the opposite course to the Sun: where heat increases, cold decreases. Hence its depression in Aries and its exaltation in Libra.

No modern planet is involved. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto have a domicile and a detriment, with no exaltation or fall, and none of the three rules Aries or Libra.

Each sign divides into three decans of 10°. AstralPro calculates them by element: the first points to the sign itself, the next two to the other signs of the same element, and the sub-ruler is the modern ruler of the associated sign. For Aries:

• 1st decan (0° to 10°): Aries, sub-ruler Mars;
• 2nd decan (10° to 20°): Leo, sub-ruler Sun;
• 3rd decan (20° to 30°): Sagittarius, sub-ruler Jupiter.

The principle is old. Al-Biruni, in his Book of Instruction in the Elements of the Art of Astrology (1029, § 451), reports that among the Indians the first decan is ruled by the lord of the sign, the second by the lord of the fifth sign, the third by the lord of the ninth. For Aries, his table gives Mars, Sun, Jupiter: AstralPro's sequence.

The Greek and Persian tradition follows another order, that of the faces. Al-Biruni (§ 449) and Lilly illustrate it with the same example: the first ten degrees of Aries are the face of Mars, the next ten that of the Sun, the last ten that of Venus. So the two systems differ here only on the last third, Jupiter by element, Venus by faces. In an AstralPro report, the word decan always means the decan by element; the face is used only in the scoring that weighs the degree of the Ascendant.

The sign first appears in two tables in chapter I. The positions table gives, for each body, its degree, sign, house and dignity: that is where you check whether a planet is in Aries and what it gains or loses there. The “House cusps” table, with its House, Position, Sign and Ruler columns, shows the houses that begin in Aries: they all have Mars as their ruler, wherever Mars happens to be.

It comes back in the block for each planet, where one paragraph names the decan and the term of the degree occupied, in the form “In the 2nd decan (sub-ruler Sun, Leo)”, followed by the term. Finally it carries weight in the dominants, where a planet in Aries counts toward Fire and toward the cardinal signs.

Camille Morel has no planet in Aries, and Fire weighs only 5% in her dominants. Yet the sign matters in her chart, because it holds two cusps: the 5th house begins at 2°12' Aries and the 6th house at 26°43' Aries. Her cusps table therefore gives Mars as ruler of both houses. Her Mars sits at 3°38' Sagittarius, in the 1st house, peregrine: the domain of pleasure and creation (the 5th house) and that of daily life and the body (the 6th house) both run through a Mars settled in the house of the person herself, in another Fire sign. In her Life Domains, the Vitality & pace of life section, which starts from the 1st and 6th houses, comments on Mars square MC (orb 3°23').

Two points occupy the sign. Lilith is at 14°01' Aries, in the 5th house: past 10°, she falls in the 2nd decan, sub-ruler Sun (Leo), in Mercury terms (12-20°). Lilith stays outside the dignity system, and her data reads “no essential dignity”. Among the asteroids, Ceres is at 24°41' Aries, also in the 5th house.

For Lilith, the reading by element and the faces meet: in the second third of Aries, both systems give the Sun.