neptune in aries & the transpersonal planet revolution

originally published April 2025

A new dream has breached the edge of our atmosphere as Neptune has entered Aries for the first time since 1861 and Pluto is resettling into Aquarius. Together, they're shifting the scaffolding of perception and the rules of engagement with reality are evolving. Neptune’s transit in 1861-1875 coincided with the American Civil War, a vortex for social, cultural, and existential upheaval. Similarly, Pluto ingressed Aquarius in November 2024 after completing its final retrogrades between Capricorn and Aquarius over the last two years. The last time Pluto was in Aquarius was from 1778-1798 during the American, French, Industrial revolutions and the Age of Enlightenment. Later this year we have the final transpersonal planet, Uranus, making its entrance into Gemini on July 7th. Uranus was last here in 1942-1949 during the United States’ involvement in World War II coinciding with communication and technological advances. These three transits are colliding and in thinking about the combined context of their last transits, this makes sense for the current state of our world. We’re living through what is likely to be a historical hotspot someday. While Pluto and Uranus are both massive pieces to it all, let’s hone in on Neptune in Aries.

Rulership of Neptune: a look at history

Looking at Mars as the new ruler of Neptune tells us a lot about the kind of reality we’re stepping into for the next 15 years until Neptune leaves Aries in 2039. Since 2011, Neptune has been answering to Jupiter as its ruler, leaving the door wide open with possibilities and variety. Neptune is about a 5th dimensional awareness that moves beyond the bounds of societal understanding, when Neptune is in Jupiter’s realm, it achieves this awareness through themes of learning, global influence, and expansion. 

During this transit we’ve seen things like: 

• The illusions of influencer culture and digital identity built into new platforms (instagram, tik tok, twitch, snapchat, pinterest, etc.)

• A rise in modern spiritual practices alongside spiritual bypassing and psychosis. 

• An obsession with nostalgia, recycling aesthetics, and past eras. (i.e. do we really need another live action Disney movie? should tradwife culture from the 50’s be romanticized like this in 2025?) 

• Advanced mental and physical health awareness, alternative healing, and therapeutic language both as useful tools and as misused weapons.

All of these things highlight Neptune’s relation to awareness, this is key to understanding how this planet functions. When tracking Neptune cycles, you’ll notice that each transit finds a way to dissolve a previously veiled reality. Its capacity for awareness invokes either truth or avoidance and ultimately allows the collective an opportunity to work this all out for itself through cycle repetition. It’s hard to neatly name the exact motif of this Neptune cycle but from these transit examples, we know that we’ve been given the awareness of new knowledge, language, beliefs, and possibilities (all very Jupiterian) that have allowed us to heal something and integrate the past. This is easy to see with typical Piscean modalities like therapeutic language or the rise of new age spirituality but if we were to apply Neptune’s integration process to influencer culture, for example, we can see just how abstract Neptune really is. 

Applied Astrology: Under the influence

Over the last 15 years, we’ve been seeing each other's real lives through our screens and particularly on these post-2010 social media platforms. This has dissolved the boundaries of mundane privacy and has opened up a new reality in which regular people are heard, elevated, and put in the position to influence beliefs, purchases, opinions, and more. Neptune in Aquarius kickstarted the transition from exclusive celebrity audiences to now lending the common person an audience. Neptune in Pisces has taken that concept and created a world of projection and illusions through our screens and it’s not even all bad. This transit has connected many voices that were once excluded to supportive platforms and communities that allow them to live out their dreams.

However, if Neptune requires a process of integration and awareness, it makes sense that this kind of culture has an undercurrent of unrealistic expectations, misinformation, and highly curated lifestyles. Neptune’s fantasies can seduce us into a painful trap of inauthenticity and whether you are the influencer or the influenced, this has been a key theme in the Neptune in Pisces integration process. Many have become aware of this over the years and have attempted to shut down the parasocial sirens that may persuade us to believe falsities about ourselves and the world. It has all sparked big conversations around consumption, ethics, and whether or not we can truly believe what we see with our eyes. 

Overall, a Jupiter ruled Neptune has brought to mind words like: spread, reach, and growth. Jupiter, as a planet of power and authority, can positively advance or injuriously metastasize whatever it touches. Paired with Neptune’s hazy and illusory nature, we’ve learned some very valuable lessons around discernment. 

Mars: Neptune’s new ruler 

No one really knows what Neptune in Aries will bring. We can make an educated guess based on the last transit but Aries is inherently about novelty, beginnings, things we have never seen before. However, observing a Mars ruled Neptune– which we have a more recent experience with through Neptune’s last transit in Scorpio (1955-1970)– can at least give us insight into how this transit might function even while there are key differences between these two faces of Mars. This is an incredibly relevant time period due to Saturn's transit through Aries in 1967-1969 as we have Saturn re-entering Aries in May 2025 as well.

Neptune’s last transit through Scorpio saw:

• Color television becoming widely available ultimately changing society and the information that it has access to. 

• A surge in sexual awareness and liberation, alongside rising rates of STDs. The introduction of the birth control pill reshaped reproductive autonomy and laid the groundwork for Roe v. Wade in 1973, just as Neptune entered Sagittarius.

• The draft for the war in Vietnam and the anti war movement that raged across the US. This was the first televised, uncensored war bringing awareness to civilians. 

• The ongoing cold war between the Soviet Union and the US that led to the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. 

• Major civil rights legislation, including the Civil Rights Act (1964), Voting Rights Act (1965), and Fair Housing Act (1968), emerging from a broader movement for racial justice led by figures like Martin Luther King Jr., alongside the lasting impact of Rosa Parks’ protest and the March on Washington.

So, what are the Martian qualities here when we sift out a Scorpio-specific perspective? War is both necessary and unnecessary. Neptune in a Martian sign has the capacity to draw awareness to tension, injustice, and the areas where we desire freedom the most and potentially overcome the cycle altogether, but it’s also a planet that hides, deceives, and feeds on fear or confusion. In a Martian sign especially, this can be deadly. 

If you’d like to dive deeper, here is an AAUP article on the parallels between the Vietnam war and the current genocide in Gaza entitled In the Shadow of Vietnam. Something that I found particularly Neptunian was when Professor Ferguson quotes Pakistani political scientist Eqbal Ahmad, “The war in Vietnam laid to rest the Third World’s illusions about the United States” (I’ve bolded “illusions” because it’s a Neptune buzzword) and goes on to say that “the image of the United States as guardian of the world and keeper of democracy would be blown to smithereens” not just for third world countries but for those living in America too. As new generations pour in nearly 50 years later, we are existing without a complete historical context and are now shocked and appalled to rediscover the contrasting narratives of the state of the world and the supposed “land of the free”.

These quotes encapsulate not only the power of Neptune’s awareness and its ability to burst the bubble of the reality that an individual or a collective might live in, but it also captures Neptunian Reenactment. This is the idea that we find ourselves in another projection, another repetition of a pattern that Neptune wants us to relive, hopefully as a means to defeat it. Variables of the repeated pattern may change, but there is usually a core theme between Neptune transits and we can already see this between the beginning of the transit through Aries and the last Mars ruled Neptune transit in Scorpio. 

Personalizing the current transit

As we’ve discussed, Neptune has a really big influence on how we interpret our reality both collectively and individually. It reminds me of films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or The Truman Show (both starring Jim Carrey who has Neptune on his Ascendant) and how the classic Neptunian themes embedded into their plot lines. Whether it’s feeling such pain that scrubbing a whole reality from your mind seems appealing or the idea that your reality was never based in truth in the first place, this is what a Neptunian transition looks like. An awakening. The bubble burst. One reality is ending and another is beginning as some new information presents itself, as a pivotal decision is made, or as a result of a change in your environment triggering a newfound awareness of what was previously distorted. 

At the end of a Neptune transit and cycle, we may feel like we are losing something, no longer identifying with a particular belief. This is the process of disillusionment. The old dream starts to shatter so a new one can be formed. Neptune is about an ideal reality and calling but throughout the transit we must peel back the layers and learn the complete truth of the ideal before really committing to it… and this often comes with a lot of sacrifice. Sacrificing the things that were “supposed” to be or what you hoped was going to happen. It’s a tough pill to swallow. Whatever is coming up for you now is seeding this new reality, you may feel as though you’ve already stepped into it after the shifts of eclipse season and the inner planet retrogrades or alternatively, you may be feeling lost! Which only means there is much more to the story. 

Saturn and Neptune are moving towards a conjunction and while the exact conjunction will not occur until 2026, we are well within the orb (15º is standard for outer planet contacts) that counts towards a Saturn-Neptune experience. There are many themes that we could explore with Saturn-Neptune but I want to talk about personal delays. 

You may notice that very often, before something new comes into your life– a new relationship or home or whatever– there is first an experience of physical or emotional contraction. Even when giving birth to a baby, the person giving birth experiences literal contractions through the shortening of the uterine muscles. Contraction is the process of something being smaller, cramped, decreased, shorter, tighter. During this Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Aries, we can see clearly through the symbolism of Aries as the first sign that something new is being created. Before that though, we must first experience contraction through Saturn, where possibilities are shrinking down to one. Very often, Saturn does this by delaying a process, holding us in place, and it feels especially murky and confusing since Neptune is involved. 

If you are currently experiencing a massive delay somewhere this message is for you: Neptune is a cosmic womb but with Saturn’s conjunction, she must have the right conditions to give birth. Neptune gives birth to dreams through awareness but it also starves the ones that aren’t supported through that same awareness. Any delays you are experiencing indicate a recalibration, connecting you with new realities that you didn’t realize were even possible, and are actually paradoxically, making your timeline move faster. This conjunction is breaking patterns and sometimes a delay is the only way to buy you the time you need to have epiphanies and to make different choices.

Neptune in Aries can represent a loss of identity. When Neptune ingressed at the end of March we are individually and collectively faced with– “Who am I? Where am I going? What happens now?” but very often we don’t have to actively find these things, they are already long standing urges that exist within us or events that synchronize around us. These pauses give us a chance to recognize them. 

If it feels like everything’s contracting, it might be because something new is opening up. 

Much love!

Your friendly neighborhood astrologer, 

Katie