In the traditional 10-month Roman calendar of Romulus, March was not the third but rather the first month of the year. This was because March was the beginning of the warfighting season, named after the god of war and tied to the constellation of Aries, the ram, the initiator. Personally I like this schema a lot. If the new year isn’t even going to be the winter solstice, why not put it closer to the start of Spring?
The importance of March has reasserted itself in an odd way in the postmodern world; the defining moment perhaps of our whole decade, coronavirus lockdowns, began last March. And now, in 2021, it’s starting to look like those lockdowns are rattling and falling away and their actual effects will be felt sharply on a clean 1-year time delay.
Mars is kinetic. He is persistent. He operates by his own set of values. He is the least yielding of all the Gods besides Jupiter; all he touches must either be destroyed or radically changed, and the forces capable of acting upon him rather than submitting to him - powers most notably belonging to Minerva, Venus, and Juno - do not dampen him but rather redirect him. There is no compromising with Mars, but there is cooperation.
The lockdowns were a desperate attempt to compromise with Mars in order to keep the old order standing. In true Greek tragic fashion, the effects of the attempt at compromise ended up being just as destructive, if not more so, than the effects of the disease which was so feared. Mars, like his brother Dionysus, will not be denied.
Mars, though, is highly directional. Wherever he points his spear, his entire being thrusts that way. What was the cut of his jib this year? In my opinion, his spear is pointing towards a fusion of localism and an emergent digital tribalism. And in this, he is ironically offering us sanctuary; the trend of the age is Aquarian, diffuse, mass-oriented, schizophrenic. And Aquarian energies are tied to Juno, Mars’ mother; they have arrived in tandem to produce the conditions that will create the next generation of Heracleidae, the ones who clear the land for new settlements.
Today’s hydra is a mass of memetic parasites wreaking mental health havoc on an entire generation. Today’s Hesperidean Apples are functional, coherent communities. And today’s internet is a Plutonian dreamscape in which most comers are imprisoned yet from which certain types may retrieve great wealth.
A new warfighting season is starting. New Heracleidae are being born. Which discord server will sail the sea between Digital and Real, become the new Aeneas, and found the next Rome?