Neptune Enters Aries for a New 165 Year Journey Around the Zodiac

Neptune is on the move, and this shift is behind the uprisings we're seeing globally. Let me explain.

As Neptune enters Aries today, on January 26th, we step into a brand-new 165-year cycle. These long arcs don’t just mark personal changes. They describe collective turning points, moments when the underlying story of our world begins to change direction.

The Setup

Since 2008, Pluto transiting Capricorn began to excavate the darker parts of our institutions, governments, and societal traditions, heralding us into the part of its cycle that Dane Rudhyar called the Crisis of Consciousness.

"It is a major crisis involving the individual's belief systems of knowing what to believe...Any group of people will have a consensus belief or philosophical system that explains the nature of phenomenal existence.

In this phase, the Soul must rebel against such consensus belief systems in order to expand its consciousness and embrace the universal truths: those not limited by any belief system. Thus, this phase correlates to a shedding of skins in which the Soul progressively begins to decondition itself from the impact of consensus opinion."

Then Neptune entered Pisces in 2011, revealing the weak points of those systems and breaking down their joinery by bringing the collective unconscious to the surface, so we could become aware of what needed to change to connect these universal truths to our society. Then, in 2023, Saturn, the builder of our material world, finally collapsed the infrastructure, dissolving our personal lives as we knew them. We could no longer pretend not see the uncomfortable truths of our past creations. The truth of our errors was revealed allowing us to see beyond the veil.

It's no surprise that Wicked was a hit movie as we ended this period, embodying the exact story most of us had become privy to during this period — the great wizard has been playing us. The story we built our lives upon was a tool of oppression, not the liberation it promised of freedom, success, and happiness.

These periods of endings bring us into contact with some of the hardest human emotions we can meet: disillusionment. What I thought was real isn't.

Our bubble pops, and the grief that rises comes like tidal waves as you realize the layers of deception and all the moments that revealed the truth you didn't see at the beginning. As things fall apart, we meet all of the pieces that we have avoided, denied, and exiled. This, especially, summarizes the last 3 years, and the heartbreak of now knowing what was living beneath the surface of our former ignorance. It brings us to our knees, as this void of despair seemingly will never end or reach a resolution.

This was a period when we became more aware, but we were stuck, unsure what to do with all our feelings and deeply depressed at the thought that things can't or won't change. This seemingly unending grief is the process of the end of an era. A slow unraveling of a world that was seeded in the 1860s, in the aftermath of revolutions, industrialization, and empire-building. Much of what we’ve known as “normal” has been breaking down and being metabolized into fuel for a new future.

Now, the tide turns.

What Neptune Really Represents

Neptune is not a practical planet. It doesn’t deal in earthly facts, linear timelines, or productivity. Neptune connects us to what exists beyond time and form. Beyond culture. Beyond consensus reality.

It governs the unseen realms, miracles, and transcendence. The soul’s knowing. The place where truth isn’t debated because it’s felt beyond the limits of language.

When something is true in Neptunian space, we recognize it in our bodies and hearts, not because we were convinced, but because it resonates at a level deeper than thought. This is discernment, not illusion. Neptune asks us to learn the difference.

As Neptune begins another journey around the Sun, this deeper form of knowing becomes central to human consciousness in a new way.

Why Context Matters: Pluto, Aquarius, and the Bigger Cycle

No planetary movement exists in isolation.

Neptune’s shift into Aries happens alongside Pluto’s recent move into Aquarius. Pluto is in the final phase of its 248-year cycle, which began in 1777, just as the United States was born.

Pluto is now in what astrologers call the waning sextile, or the 300-degree point of its cycle. Jeffrey Wolf Green, the founder of Evolutionary Astrology, describes this point as “the new creative identity of the individual in relation to the cosmic whole is now given a productive purpose and understanding.” It represents a moment when the soul’s newly forming sense of self and evolutionary direction can begin to be applied meaningfully in life, linking inner insights with outward expression. It's part of the Last Quarter phase (270°–360°), bringing what has been learned during the crisis in consciousness into practical application.

Pluto in Aquarius works at the level of collective systems and shared power. Neptune, moving into Aries, brings that soul-level truth into action. It says: you didn't realize this, so you could suffer; you realized it all, so you are moved to action to transform it. Peace isn't handed to you; it's something those now alive must actively co-create.

Together, they form a supportive sextile, an opportunity aspect. Add Uranus entering Gemini later this year, and we enter a nine-year window where radical change can move from the unseen into tangible reality, bringing greater coherence to our collective creations of life.

Neptune in Aries: The Spiritual Warrior Awakens

If Pisces dissolved, Aries ignites.

Neptune in Aries asks a simple but profound question:
What is worth fighting for?

This isn’t about aggression for its own sake. It’s about devotion. It’s about acting from a deep inner knowing of what is just, equitable, and life-affirming for all beings.

A spiritual warrior archetype is activated for the next 14 years. Not a warrior of domination, but one who brings love into places it has never been before. One who refuses to initiate the future without honoring the truth of what they've learned through their pain.

This archetype doesn’t bypass anger. It listens to it.

Rage, Grief, and the Return to the Body

Aries teaches us that rage is not the enemy. Unconscious rage is. Suppressed rage is. Disassociated rage is.

But rage that is listened to holds profound insight. It tells us where boundaries were crossed, where harm occurred, and where something essential was denied. For many, especially over the last 15 years, that anger was never given permission to exist.

Neptune in Aries invites us to feel it deeply and then give it purpose. To move us into action that makes it right.

This is how we come back into our bodies. This is how we regulate our nervous systems after years of numbness, apathy, and powerlessness. This is how we remember that we matter to each other.

Much of the collective grief we’ve been carrying is grief from disconnection. From forgetting our importance in one another’s lives. From mistaking personal comfort for success.

This moment is a wake-up call.

The Collective Mirror

As this article is being written, we are witnessing governments around the world attempting to dehumanize people based on appearance, paperwork, or ideology. We are also witnessing people rising up to say no.

“These are my neighbors. These are my friends. These are good people.”

This is Neptune in Aries in real time.

Historically, when Pluto is in Aquarius and Neptune is in Aries, we see periods of intense conflict between those in power and those without it. We see ordinary people discovering the strength of their passion and acting on behalf of one another.

It motivates us to behave in ways we never have before for collective healing.

Choosing Who We Will Be

Neptune in Aries will continue to reveal where our unclaimed power lives. The sextile to Pluto wakes up buried resources within us, places of strength we didn’t know we had.

The pain of the past years has not been for nothing. It has refined our discernment process. It has shown us what doesn’t work, what harms, and what disconnects.

Now comes the choice.

Who will you be in this chapter of the story?
Will you answer the call of your soul?
Will you act on what your heart knows is true?

This is a time of reckoning, yes. But those in power have miscalculated who will be the ones to experience retribution.

This is the Age of Aquarius, where power lives in the people, the many, not the few. This age will be redistributing power, but Neptune in Aries requires that you seize the day. This is an active process, and your effort and instincts are required.

As Saturn follows Neptune into Aries and their conjunction approaches in February of 2026, to reset the landscape, the focus will shift toward building. Saturn will ask how to embed compassion, justice, and coherence in our infrastructure that lasts for generations to come.

That story is still unfolding, and we’ll explore it more soon...

For now, know this:
Have faith that a new dawn is rising through each of us.
The old world is dissolving.
The fire is being lit.
And each of us has a role in what comes next, so choose your part wisely.