This month features the first of the three major ingresses of 2025: Neptune going into Aries on March 30th, Saturn into Aries in May and Uranus into Gemini in July.
Neptune takes about 168 years to traverse the zodiac, so when it changes signs, it’s a big deal. Moreover, it’s moving from the sign of its rulership, Pisces, where it’s been since 2011, into Aries.
This is a dramatic shift. Of any zodiacal pair, Pisces and Aries are the two most different from one another.
Subtle background shift
What kind of changes can we expect, when Neptune changes signs?
On the level of global consciousness, an ingress like this marks a very general shift in the mass mood, too subtle to match up with specific events. At least, not until a few decades have passed; when viewed from the long arc of history, it’s easier to see what a Neptune tenure was up to. Even when we’re in the midst of it, we can start to get a sense of the new era when other planets click into place, making aspects to Neptune in its new home.
But we don’t have to wait for events to arise. We can look at the planet’s symbolism, and discern what we’re meant to be learning over the next 14 years.
Nothing and everything
Neptune is an other-worldly planet. No matter what sign it’s in, it wants to seduce humanity away from our identification with material reality. If its
transits do express themselves through form, it’s only to teach us about formlessness.
If Neptune is hitting a natal planet and you’re feeling unclarity and doubt, that’s not the transit going wrong. That’s the transit going right. Neptune erodes and dissolves solid things, for the purpose of showing us how deluded we were to take them seriously. It teaches impermanence.
Wherever it’s transiting, the best approach is to lead with the part of our psyche that we call the intuition. It’s our spiritual sense, not our conceptual mind, that speaks Neptunian.
Mist meets fire
So let’s try to get our heads around how to match Neptune – governor of poetry, dreams and deceptions — with the straight-shooting sign of Aries.
Here we have the most obscure, hard-to-define planet getting ready to move through the most obvious, impulsive sign in the zodiac. For a decade and a half, the world will be navigating Neptune’s inscrutable yearnings with as much courage as we can muster. Aries, the boldest of the fire signs, will demand it.
Before Neptune gets there, Mercury will arrive in Aries (3/3) and then the Sun (3/20). The atmosphere will quicken. These ingresses crank up the collective heat. The best of Aries is symbolized by the extroverted beauties of Springtime (Northern hemisphere), when the natural world is bursting forth with vigor and new life.
As for the worst of the sign, we’re all too familiar with that side of Aries. It is symbolized, at its crudest, by war, and, when expressed by insecure individuals, by toxic masculinity. But the macho posturing and bullying associated with Aries arise not from the sign in its essential form, but from its unbalanced form.
No surprise to anyone familiar with the imperfect human condition. Deeply unconscious people express distorted versions of a given sign.
Cosmic point
But even this unfortunate scenario has a cosmic point to make. Unrefined expressions of a particular archetype push to the fore critical issues that need to be addressed. People get to thinking about them. When the worst of Aries – brute force, lack of empathy – are on full display, the
popular mind has to face them.
And the best of Aries – the samurai, who uses martial skill with wisdom and leadership – also shows up. The mass mind gets to look at both sides of the sign, and understand what unites these energies at their essence.
Although the heroic version of Aries may not get as much attention – such is the human taste for drama, right? The nasty bits have more juice, as our algorithms have figured out – heroes will arise under these transits, and serve as models for all who are open to them.
Do this thought experiment on the partial solar eclipse (March 29th, tenth degree of Aries). Ask yourself who, among the people in your public or personal life, is displaying the lower and the higher versions of this sign. Who is the thug, and who the hero?
And the walls come tumbling down
When March begins, Neptune and Saturn are 8 degrees apart. Over the next few weeks, their applying conjunction will be lapping at our feet, slowly and inexorably, like the incoming tide. It will be almost exact this July, and will perfect (same degree, same minute of arc) in Feb 2026.
The merger of these two seemingly antagonistic planets will be a game-changer for the world, as suggested both by their symbolism and by historical patterns. Every 36 years or so, the conjunction signals the rise and fall of empires.
For individuals, it could signal a milestone of spiritual maturity (discussed in my webinar, “Controlled Abandon”) by detaching us from our conditioning. Or it could be merely destabilizing. One way or another, it’s designed to erode (Neptune) the structures (Saturn) in our lives.
How will the conjunction manifest for you, personally? Get in touch with the house of your chart where these planets are passing (discussed in my 3/22 webinar, “In Charge But Not in Control”). This is your heads-up about where in your life the transit is active, so you can better maximize the mind-expansion of the transit and minimize its confusion.
