PHASE 69 (GEMINI 9°): A QUIVER FILLED WITH ARROWS.

KEYNOTE: Human's aggressive relationship to natural life, as a basis for survival and conquest.

The bow and arrows represent symbolically human's ability to extend the scope of their conquest of nature and to kill enemies in order to build a larger base for the collective development of a culture and an organized society. Implied in the symbol of the arrow is the piercing of a target. The mind of a person is essentially a trans-piercing power; it goes through the object toward which it is aimed. It seeks to go through and beyond the obstacles on its path, and this usually implies the destruction of the obstacle. At a higher level — as in the Zen practice of archery — the obstacle is the ego.

At this fourth stage of the fourteenth five-fold sequence of phases in the cyclic process of human existence we are shown the archetypal symbol of human, the Conqueror. It may be a conquest of outer nature, or that of instinctual drives and of the limiting power of the ego. It is always CONQUEST.