Aries 17° (16° to 17°)
Sabian Symbol: Two dignified spinsters sitting in silence
Symbol wording: Dane Rudhyar, An Astrological Mandala (1973)
Explore the Gamla Healing Aries collection of embroidered caps and hoodies.
The Essence
- Withdrawal chosen deliberately differs from isolation that happens by default.
- When outer engagement drains, turning inward is an appropriate response rather than a failure.
- Chosen solitude strengthens a receptive side of the self that constant activity crowds out.
- Some relationships cost more in lost uniqueness than the comfort they supply is worth.
- What looks eccentric, even farcical, from outside can reflect a privately sustained sense of meaning.
- Society's usual judgment need not be the last word on how a good life looks.
- Fidelity to oneself sometimes requires insulation from outside opinion, at least for a while.
- Withdrawal of this kind protects something valuable rather than avoiding life.
- Divorcement taken too far curdles into self-importance rather than self-possession.
- Chosen solitude is its own quiet strength, not a lesser substitute for connection.
The Image
Two unmarried women, sitting together, saying nothing to each other or to us. The word the symbol uses for them is dignified, and that is the whole argument.
We need to look squarely at what the picture is doing, because its language belongs to its period and its content does not. In 1925 these two women were a recognised social category and the category was a judgement: they had not married, they had not had children, and and the culture around them scored that as a life which had failed to happen. The symbol declines to score it that way. It gives them dignity, in silence, by choice, and it asks us what we think we are looking at.
Then notice the silence, because it is the real subject of what we are shown. They are sitting together and not talking, and there are two completely different things that can look like this from outside. One of them is the silence of two people with nothing left to say, which is a sort of defeat. The other is the silence of people who do not need to perform conversation, which is one of the highest achievements available in a relationship, and you will know from your own life how few people you can actually do it with.
And see where this falls in the sequence, because the placement is an argument too. At Aries 16° the world was alive, populated, visible at sunset, and the whole degree was about perception opening outward. This is the second step of the group, which always answers the first, and the answer here is a closed door and two chairs. Both of them are correct, and the zodiac is not choosing between them for us.
Think of the people you know who stepped out of the expected sequence of a life. The ones who did not marry, or did not have children, or left a career just as it was going to work. We have an enormous vocabulary for reading those lives as deficits, and almost none for the possibility that somebody looked at our available script and declined it. The two women in this image are the second case, and the symbol is not defending them. It simply refuses to explain them to us.
Jones gave the degree the keyword divorcement, which is harsh and exact. Something has been separated from something else, deliberately. Not a failure to attach but an act of detaching, and the word carries the cost without apologising for it.
This is Phase 17 of the 360, the second step inside the cycle's fourth group of five, in the second scene. After a degree spent perceiving the world, the sequence turns and asks what you are when nobody is looking at you and nothing is required of you.
Explore the Gamla Healing Aries collection of embroidered caps and hoodies.
The Archetype
The archetype is the one who steps out of the line, and it is nearly always the women who get punished for it.
We find the figures everywhere, and we have rarely treated them kindly. The anchoress walled into a cell beside the church, who turns out to be the most interesting writer of her century. The aunt in our family stories whose life gets described entirely in terms of what she did not do. The Beguines, who organised themselves into communities without vows and without husbands, and whom we investigated for it. The woman living alone at the edge of the village, whose independence became evidence at a trial.
What the archetype knows is that we read voluntary withdrawal as a threat rather than a preference, and we should be honest with ourselves about why. A person who has stepped outside the arrangement is a standing demonstration that the arrangement is optional, and that is intolerable to those of us still inside it who had not realised we had a choice. Our hostility is not really about them. It is about what their existence implies about us.
Jones's two poles are precise about the ways this can go. At its best, this degree is a self-possession that needs no audience, a person complete in their own company, whose silence is full and whose detachment has preserved something that engagement would have cost them. At its worst the withdrawal hardens. What began as a choice becomes a fortress, the detachment extends to everybody rather than to what was worth leaving, and the dignity curdles into superiority: a person who has retreated from life and then decided the retreat was a judgement on everyone else.
The archetype's question is therefore uncomfortable and necessary. Did you step out of something, or did you simply stop being able to be with anybody?
The Taoist Current
Chapter forty-seven of the Dao De Jing gave this series its case for stillness at Aries 9°, where the emphasis was on perception. Here the same lines carry a different weight. Without going outside, you may know the whole world. The more you run about, the less you know.
At the crystal gazer we read the chapter as a technique. At the two silent women it is describing a life, and that is a much stronger claim. Laozi is not suggesting a quiet afternoon. He is saying that the running about we take for engagement with the world is frequently the thing preventing us from understanding it, and that the one of us who stays put may end up knowing more than the one who travelled.
The Taoist literature keeps a particular affection for the figure who withdraws, and the affection is not sentimental. The recluse in those texts has usually seen the court at close range and left on purpose, and we are shown the departure as a competence rather than a retirement. What it never does is confuse withdrawal with resentment, and the ones it admires left quietly and stopped commenting on us.
The Yi Jing Resonance
The primary hexagram is Hexagram 33, Dun (Retreat), the mountain under heaven, and its commentary is unusually practical about this degree's subject. Retreat is not defeat for any of us; it is the correct response to conditions where advance would cost more than it gains, and the text is specific that it must be done in time and without bitterness. A withdrawal conducted in anger is a different manoeuvre with a different outcome.
Its complement is Hexagram 52, Gen (Keeping Still), which we met at Aries 6° as the settling of a form. Here it supplies the inner condition that makes the retreat worth anything. Dun gives us the departure and Gen gives us the stillness that has to be achieved afterwards, because somebody who leaves the court and spends thirty years thinking about it has not actually retreated.
The Philosophical Content
Sherry Turkle's research arrives at this degree from an unexpected direction. Studying how people use their devices, she found that the capacity for solitude was eroding, and she drew a distinction that matters here: solitude is not loneliness, it is the state in which a person can gather themselves, and her finding was that people who cannot be alone become more rather than less dependent on others. Her formulation is that if we do not teach our children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely. The two women in silence give us solitude in Turkle's sense, and they are together, which is her further point. The capacity to be alone is what makes real company possible.
Marcus Aurelius built the same idea into a daily discipline. He wrote repeatedly about retreating into oneself, and his image for it is a citadel, an inner place that cannot be taken by circumstance, available at any moment without travel. What is striking about the Meditations is the context: the man writing them was running an empire and conducting wars, and the inner retreat was not an alternative to that life but the thing that made it survivable. That cuts off the easy reading of this degree. Withdrawal here is not the opposite of engagement. It is the interior arrangement that lets a person engage without being dissolved by it.
The Evolutionary Astrology Lens
A planet at this degree marks a soul working out the difference between a chosen solitude and a defended one.
Pluto here usually points to a history in which being with people was costly. Sometimes your cost was invasion: a family with no privacy, a parent who required access to everything, so that your only safe place was inside you. Sometimes it was the reverse, and you were alone among people who were only technically present, which teaches that company is unreliable and that you had better be sufficient. Either way the solitude was earned rather than discovered, and that is what makes it hard to tell apart from a wall.
The South Node pattern is the fortress. You are self-sufficient, you are not lonely exactly, and your life has quietly been arranged so that nobody can require anything of you. It is comfortable and it works, and your tell is what happens when somebody gets close: a faint impatience, a cataloguing of their faults, a relief when they go. The detachment has stopped being selective.
The other pattern is the undignified version, and it is the one Jones's word points at. Here you have not withdrawn at all but sit permanently half-in, present at everything and committed to nothing, and the result is neither solitude nor company.
The North Node asks for solitude that is chosen rather than installed. Which means, practically, keeping the silence and testing the wall: being deliberately alone, often, and separately letting one person all the way in. The soul growth is Turkle's point lived rather than read, where the capacity to be alone turns out to be what makes somebody worth being with.
Saturn at this degree builds the fortress efficiently and makes it respectable. Moon here can make company feel physically expensive to you. Uranus produces the dramatic exit and often mistakes it for freedom. Venus at this degree is interesting, because it tends to produce somebody who loves deeply and at a distance, and who has to work out whether their distance is protecting the love or replacing it.
What matures here is quietly formidable. A person entirely at home alone, who can sit with somebody for an hour without speaking, and whose company is restful because nothing is being performed.
The Buddhist Dimension
The pratyekabuddha is the tradition's own name for this degree's possibility and its limit. The word describes somebody who awakens alone, without a teacher and without a community, and who then does not teach. The texts grant the attainment fully. They are also clear that it stops there, and the Mahayana contrast with the bodhisattva is drawn precisely on this point.
What makes the figure useful rather than a straw man is that the tradition does not sneer. Solitary realisation is real realisation, and the retreat that produced it was not a mistake. The question raised is only about what happens next, and it is the same question this degree asks: a withdrawal that preserves something is a competence, and a withdrawal that ends in a sealed room has turned the competence into the whole of a life. The tradition leaves the judgement open, which is more honest than most of our own commentary on people who live alone.
The Soul's Work
Your work at this degree is to tell your chosen solitude apart from your defended one, and the test is not introspection.
Start with the honest question, and it has a specific form. Not whether you enjoy your own company, which tells you nothing, but what happens in you when somebody comes close. Think of the last time somebody wanted more of you than you had planned to give them. What arrived in you then? If it was a faint impatience, a quick private inventory of their shortcomings, a relief when they left, you are looking at a wall rather than a preference. Treat that as information about you rather than as an accusation.
Then do both halves of the practice, because this degree is ruined by doing only one. Take your solitude properly, scheduled, with nobody to account to, and stay past the point where it feels indulgent to you. And separately, let one person all the way in on something you would normally handle on your own. Not everybody. One, deliberately chosen.
And practise the silence, since it is the actual content of the symbol. Sit with somebody you trust and do not fill your silence. Most of us last about forty seconds before reaching for a topic, and your discomfort will show you how much of your company has been maintenance work.
Two people, sitting together, saying nothing, and neither of them diminished by it. That is not a failed life. It is a rare one, and it is within your reach.
Explore the Gamla Healing Aries collection of embroidered caps and hoodies.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Sabian Symbol for Aries 17°?
The Sabian Symbol for Aries 17° is Two dignified spinsters sitting in silence, in the wording Dane Rudhyar gave it in An Astrological Mandala (1973). The image itself was channelled by Elsie Wheeler in 1925 and first recorded by Marc Edmund Jones. It is Phase 17 of the 360, the second step inside the cycle's fourth group of five. Jones's keyword is divorcement.
What does Aries 17° mean in a natal chart?
A planet here points to a life that works best with a great deal of solitude in it, and often to a path that steps outside the expected sequence. The strength is self-possession that needs no audience. The work is keeping the detachment selective, so that it preserves what matters rather than excluding everybody.
What is the keyword for Aries 17°?
The keyword Marc Edmund Jones assigned is DIVORCEMENT, meaning a deliberate separation rather than a failure to attach. At its best this degree is a person complete in their own company, whose silence is full and whose detachment preserved something engagement would have cost. At its worst the withdrawal hardens into a fortress and the dignity curdles into superiority.
What is the shadow side of Aries 17°?
The fortress: self-sufficient, not quite lonely, with a life arranged so that nobody can require anything of you. The tell is what happens when somebody gets close, a faint impatience and a relief when they go. The opposite failure is being permanently half-in, present at everything and committed to nothing, which produces neither solitude nor company.
How does Turkle's research on solitude relate to this degree?
Turkle found the capacity for solitude eroding and distinguished it sharply from loneliness: solitude is the state in which a person gathers themselves, and those who cannot be alone become more dependent rather than less. Her point that the capacity to be alone is what makes real company possible is exactly what two women in a full silence demonstrate.
How does Marcus Aurelius's Stoic philosophy apply here?
Marcus Aurelius wrote repeatedly about retreating into an inner citadel available at any moment without travel, and the context matters: he was running an empire while writing it. That rules out reading this degree as the opposite of engagement. The withdrawal is the interior arrangement that lets a person engage without being dissolved.
How does Pluto factor into the Evolutionary Astrology Lens at this degree?
Pluto points to a history in which company was costly, whether through invasion, a family with no privacy and a parent who required access to everything, or through being alone among people who were only technically present. The solitude was earned rather than discovered, which is what makes it hard to distinguish from a wall. The Nodes move toward solitude that is chosen and detachment that stays selective.
How does the Yi Jing illuminate this degree?
Hexagram 33, Dun (Retreat), gives the mountain under heaven and treats withdrawal as the correct response when advance would cost more than it gains, insisting it be done in time and without bitterness. Its complement, Hexagram 52, Gen (Keeping Still), supplies the inner stillness afterwards, since somebody who leaves and then spends thirty years thinking about it has not retreated.
0 comments