Neptune takes approximately 165 years to complete its orbit. Every fourteen years it enters a new sign. Each ingress describes a shift in the collective imagination, in the register of idealism available to the culture, in the direction of the spiritual and the romantic and the impossible.
Neptune enters Aries in 2027. The last time Neptune was in Aries was 1861 to 1875: the American Civil War, the Reconstruction era, the beginning of significant women's suffrage activism. The cycle before that began in 1697. A slow planet making rare contact with a sign that initiates.
Neptune dissolves, idealizes, and confuses. Aries initiates, asserts, and individualizes. The combination creates a kind of idealized self-concept: the individual hero as romantic ideal rather than simply a personality type. Neptune in Aries tends to coincide with movements organized around individual rights and self-determination, aesthetic movements glorifying action and will, a cultural imagination infused with heroic possibility.
The shadow of Neptune in Aries is messianism: the belief that one individual can save everything, and the reckoning that follows when the individual is revealed to be ordinary.
The series runs three threads. Ren covers what the transit describes in terms of collective astrological conditions, precise, evidence-based, honest about what we can and cannot know about how these transit correlations play out. Mira covers what it means for women's movements and women's cultural identity specifically: the practical, structural register. Aurora covers the imaginative and aesthetic dimension: the quality of cultural dreaming that becomes possible, the kind of beauty the culture will want to make.
These articles were written in advance of the transit's exact ingress. Reading a future collective moment: a different exercise than reading a completed one.