We Need To Talk About Tuxedo Mask
On growing up, identity, and our relationship with the Yang (not the Piofiore one)
They say to never meet your idols as the reality of them would disappoint (I don’t believe that Universe, pls align the stars 🙏🏻🛐🕯️) but nobody ever warns you about watching your childhood favourite anime, which is at the centre of most of your inner child wounds, as an adult.
Good things about Sailor Moon:
Even the biggest crybaby can be a superheroine
She doesn’t have to do it alone
Moon cat familiar
The parents are kinda cute
Hot villains for the grown ups there watching with a child on their lap (physically or metaphorically) 🫣
Bad things about Sailor Moon
90s weight stigma that may or may not still be this bad in Japan
Mamoru
TUXEDO MASK ALWAYS SAVING THE DAY
Welcome to the Aries newsletter, where we’re about to dive deep once again into the themes of the first house such as identity, how we package and present ourselves, our personality, the image we offer to others.
I’m being mostly tongue in cheek about Tuxedo Mask saving the day being a bad thing, because in truth, as I sat with this essay in my head pulling all the strings so that I could have a coherent and insightful narrative to present you with, it came to me that it makes a great metaphor for the balance of the masculine and the feminine in ourselves.
It is undeniable, though, that my childhood self interpreted the dynamic through a problematic lens, fuelled by growing up in the cultural framework of Catholicism (a religion wholly built around needing a saviour) and the way children’s brains jump to conclusion about their own goodness far too easily.
River Selby, in another essay on this platform that came to my attention via, you probably guessed it, the Moon Studio (it’s either them or Holisticism 80% of the time) explored the way we get stuck in a negative feedback loop of feeling like we are fundamentally flawed well into adulthood.
This quote stood out to me:
It’s the belief that we are damaged, flawed, and in need of repair that makes us feel damaged, flawed, and in need of repair.
I already touched upon this idea in an episode of the podcast, and more and more things have come into my field of awareness to show me that I’m not as radical as I think I am, and I mean that as a good thing. As much as I love to share a platform with people who embrace being visionaries and thought-leaders, my desire is to see the things that feel radical now as normal and obvious. I prefer it when I can find a tribe of people who validate what I feel against my Inner Critic that has chastised me for thinking too highly of myself all my life.
Who are you to believe you have healed enough to focus on growth and expansion rather than moving from an identity of inherent brokenness and victimhood? Because it would be easy enough to make Spirituality and Magic just Catholicism without the big-g god. Power sounds good but have you thought about the shadow?
Recently, I’ve become acquainted with the book The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock. You’d think I’d already know of it, but time works in mysterious ways, whatever that is because time does not exist as far as I’m concerned. At least Cronos, I can experience time as Kairos.
The premise of the book, subtitled Woman's Quest for Wholeness, is that "The feminine journey is about going down deep into soul, healing and reclaiming, while the masculine journey is up and out, to spirit."
Of the stages she presents as part of the narrative arc of our experience of ourselves, I am now at some unspecified point between “The descent/meeting with the goddess” and “Reconciliation with the masculine”, although the three stages in question feel like they happened at the same time. In this same timeline, I mean.
Joseph Campbell reportedly criticised the model that later became the book saying that: "Women don’t need to make the journey, they are the place that everyone is trying to get to”, which makes me wonder what world he has been living in that valued the qualities of the feminine.
I don’t necessarily believe that his model of the Hero’s Journey cannot apply to women just because our journey is often more of a return to ourselves than a growth arc, but I find value in Murdock spelling it out. That’s because I believe the direction of the journey transcends our gender.
Sailor Moon is a growth arc involving young women stepping into their powers in what, arguably, is a masculine way. Over the course of the series, there is a lot of becoming by way of doing, as an assorted array of evil ikemen make attempts to get to something before they do.
Arguably, it is the male protagonist who goes on the heroine’s journey. He is the one whose storyline first follows the river of remembrance of his true self. For all of my kneejerk reactions about how my family trusting that if it was animation on TV it was for children showing a child too young to engage with the relational dynamic at play a bad model.
It isn’t so much a bad model, as one you need to be mature enough to engage with critically. You need to be able to read between the lines of tropes that have given us 90% of references in shōjo manga since, and read into how much of Tuxedo Mask’s lore as a hero is Usagi’s romantic imagination filling in the gaps.
He saves the day most of the time, but often the other Sailors do so, and he was saved himself by them (Sailor Moon of all people!) at least once. It isn’t quite “a woman always needs a man” as my righteous indignation would like to believe.
Indignation that says more about me than it does about anything else. It’s effectively a reaction on behalf of my younger self and the decision she made, which led to a toxic marriage with someone who believed a steady pay-check was all the contribution he was required to make in spite of all the books about the Catholic vision for marriage I pushed on him to make sure we were on the same page.
Finding my identity when everything came crashing down required me to dig deep into why he thinks I have changed when, in truth, all that’s changed about me is the cultural reference of my spirituality. Deep down, I want the same things I’ve always wanted.
3 years ago, judging by the date on the letter on the back of the paper I used for it, my therapist gave me an exercise about what marriage means to me. It’s a triangle that represents my soul, and the 3 angles are the ideas I took from faith and community, my family, and what I myself believe.
The thing that strikes me is that my own beliefs do not include sacrifice. Compromise was modelled to me as going all the way to meet the other person where they are, and that’s what brought about all the issues that were enough to be worth a whole book. Which is in the works, by the way.
But I understand compromise as meeting half-way. It requires you knowing yourself to be able to know what’s non-negotiable, and what can be brought to the table in order to find a solution that satisfies everyone involved.
The more I walk the spiritual journey, the more it’s obvious to me that selfishness is all there is. It should never have been a word, let alone a negative concept. Spiritual work is identity work. The Zodiac is but one meaning-making system that makes the self foundational.
It’s so significant to me that the year ends in the Yin waters of Pisces, the liminal space of the womb, and transitions into the fiery outward Yang energy of Aries at the Spring Equinox, ushering the first house of Self. Truly like a birth of a new version of ourselves if we are inclined to meet them.
Before you go…
✨ The prolonged issue with the systems at the British Library has got in the way of my plans to make more educational content in 2024, so this newsletter and the podcast will still remain as they are for now.
You can pledge support for a paid expansion to weekly for a lower cost as of today (£4.4 monthly, £44 for the year). It will be a curation of resources from my hedonist heart to yours as I live true to my Libra 12H that can’t separate beauty and spirituality. A mini-retreat, like taking the time out to go to Mass and Benediction on Sundays used to be. You can use them for as long or as little as you like.
✨ Starting this week, the podcast is going to explore the houses in order. I have some guests lined-up to help me bring the conversation from the theory of all the books to the lived experience, which is what matters. If you have expertise that relates to, or a story to tell for a specific house, you can apply here.
✨ Being distracted by realising the other Prince Mamoru has a song titled Magic, I almost forgot that if you want to keep up to date with my photography work and when you can book me (open internationally), I also have a newsletter for that.
Until next time, keep living in wonder