MAJOR PLANETARY INGRESSES (noting personal planets in this list only when they involve a retrograde)
January 2: Venus enters Pisces
January 6: Mars retrogrades back into Cancer
January 11: Lunar nodes move from Aries/Libra to Pisces/Virgo
February 4: Venus enters Aries
February 23: Mars stations direct at 17 Cancer
March 1: Venus stations retrograde at 10 Aries
March 14: Mercury stations retrograde at 9 Aries
March 27: Venus reenters Pisces
March 29: Mercury reenters Pisces
March 30: NEPTUNE ENTERS ARIES FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 1875 (will retrograde back into Pisces on October 22)
April 7: Mercury stations direct at 26 Pisces
April 12: Venus stations direct at 24 Pisces
April 18: Mars reenters Leo
May 1: Venus reenters Aries
May 24: SATURN ENTERS ARIES FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 1998 (will retrograde back into Pisces on September 1)
June 9: JUPITER ENTERS CANCER FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 2014
July 7: URANUS ENTERS GEMINI FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 1949 (will retrograde back into Taurus on November 7)
July 17: Mercury stations retrograde at 15 Leo
August 10: Mercury stations direct at 4 Leo
November 9: Mercury stations retrograde at 6 Sagittarius
November 29: Mercury stations direct at 20 Scorpio
NOTABLE PLANETARY ASPECTS:
January 2: Mars in Leo opposite Pluto in Aquarius
January 21: Pluto conjunct Sun (Cazimi on inauguration day)
January 29: Pluto conjunct Mercury
April 27: Mars in Leo opposite Pluto in Aquarius
June 15: Jupiter square Saturn, Mars square Uranus
June 19: Jupiter square Neptune
Saturn in Aries is closest to Neptune in June and July, but they won’t be exactly conjunct in Aries until 2026
August 9: Mars opposite Saturn, Mars opposite Neptune
August 12: Saturn sextile Uranus
August 29: Uranus sextile Neptune
September 24: Mars square Pluto
November 4: Mars opposite Uranus
December 9: Mars square Saturn
December 14: Mars square Neptune
ECLIPSES:
March 13/14: Lunar Eclipse at 23 Virgo
March 29: Solar Eclipse at 9 Aries (final Aries eclipse in the series of the last year and-a-half)
September 7: Lunar Eclipse at 15 Pisces
Solar Eclipse at 29 Virgo
HOT ZONES: First few days of January/late March/April, July/August
In my 25 years of writing about astrology, I’ve never seen a year quite like 2025. “Years” are frameworks created by humans to help us understand and organize the wonder and agony of living as sentient beings in bodies on Earth. The Gregorian calendar has nothing to do with astrological cycles that span centuries, and yet as we look back and forward, it’s a useful metric for our immeasurably tiny lives as compared to the infinite cosmos.
As I wind through what’s ahead in the next twelve months, this is just a note to say that even if the potential outcomes I discuss alarm you, humans like us have lived on this planet for about 300,000 years, and recorded our history for only 5,000 of those (that we know of now). Astrology, a language of time-keeping, has been around for just about the same period as far as we know.
My point is that even as you watch the truly annoying annual recaps that try to sane-wash the absolute insanity of what we lived through in 2024, humans have endured and survived and built communities and societies and created agriculture and art and healed bodies and made magical technology even through what must have looked to them like collapse. I guess our hope as creatures of the late 20th and early 21st centuries was that we’d have it figured out by now, but alas, we’re still working on it.
And we will continue to work on it, even if the next year(s) are difficult ones for us. 2025 is a year unlike anyone living right now has ever experienced, and we will get through it together. Community building at the smallest scale has never been more important. If I can impart one tiny nugget of wisdom in this forecast, let this be the one.
Looking back/Looking forward
The Saturn-Pluto conjunction in January of 2020 was foreboding. Yet, I didn’t have a specific sense of what lay ahead in the months before, other than that it had something to do with danger to the collective and Trump’s inability/refusal to protect us. We suffered terribly, but we lived through it. Millions died and we now know something about survival in scary times. I worry more for those who never processed their Covid trauma or compartmentalized it so effectively that they think it wasn’t that bad.
In late 2019 as I worked on my 2020 forecasts, I felt a deeper sense of dread than I do now, because I think the lessons of that recent, terrible year can be applied to whatever is ahead, with less anxiety, even though the same fascist will be at the wheel. The truth is that we’ve been in an unfolding state of collapse for some years already, with the trappings of normalcy. Accepting that the center has already failed to hold is one way that we can embrace the astrology of 2025 and build something more resilient for all.
In the broadest strokes, the reason this year is profoundly unique is because so many outer planets change signs. Jupiter changes signs every 12 months, and every 2.5 to 3 years Saturn does as well. But this year Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter and Uranus all change signs. The lunar nodes also change signs. Mars and Venus both have retrogrades in the winter and early spring, almost overlapping one with another. And in March and April, there is explosive, unrelenting activation in the sign of Aries.
If you only learn one thing about your own chart this year, understand which house is ruled by Aries and whether you have any planets there, and pay close attention to the themes that emerge in this part of your life from March to October, when both Saturn and Neptune will back out of Aries until early 2026.
Aries, the first sign of the zodiac, is a cardinal fire sign ruled by malefic Mars. It lights the match, initiates, instigates, aggresses, and attacks. Aries is the assertion of existence: the I AM principle that announces its exit from the birth canal with a scream.
Aries tells us where we should begin, in the parlance of Esther Perel. It is the purest form of erotic energy: the animal version of our desire. It must move and thrust and push with force not because it wants to do harm, but because it cannot help itself. If thwarted or suppressed, Aries energy can become anger, rivarly and violence, and in its most dangerous form, war. Once it is exercised, it is usually sated for a short time until its latency period ends and it must once again push forward with purpose.
And this year, the constellation of Aries is the proverbial room where it happens.
One of the ways astrology is useful as a timekeeping tool is when we graph planetary cycles with historical events, and 2025 stands out for its eerie resemblance to years past when human events spilled out of control. The Civil War began in 1861 within a day of Neptune’s entrance into Aries. Uranus was in Gemini during the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II. Saturn and Neptune conjoin every 36 years, but haven’t done so in Aries in centuries. The last time they were together (in Capricorn) the Soviet Union collapsed. Let’s break down the most important shifts of the year.
Saturn and Neptune and the Melting of Reality
There’s much to digest about what’s ahead, but to get grounded, something that will be of urgent necessity in the coming years, we’ve got to understand the nature of Saturn, the nature of Neptune, and what happens when they come together.
Saturn is the wall, the blockage, the boundary, the authority, the Big Daddy, the Cosmic Taskmaster and teacher. Neptune is the mythmaker, the god/goddess-head, the divine, the ethereal, and the creatrix of illusion/delusion.
Spanish painter Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory offers us an image and a metaphor for the energy of Saturn with Neptune: it’s utterly fucking surreal. We’re familiar with this painting, it’s so ubiquitous it’s an art cliché, but imagine people’s reaction the first time they saw surrealist paintings. It’s that warped reality effect that Saturn and Neptune will create in our lives this year, except not in a museum or a gallery: in the very fabric of our lives and institutions, as they seem to melt away.
Neptune has been in Pisces since 2011, where it gave us Instagram, enmeshing us with thousands of filtered images, and making us comfortable with an altered reality. This Piscean soft-focus escapist glamour mesmerized us and softened us up for what came next: Saturn’s entry into Pisces in 2023, and the co-presence of the planet of pink fog (Neptune) and the planet of hard tablet law (Saturn). They will be co-present in Pisces, and then almost conjunct in Aries this summer, and co-present in Pisces again, exactly conjunct in Aries in early 2026, and then co-present in Aries through 2028.
With Saturn as the solid to Neptune’s liquid, this planetary relationship speaks to erosion. Ocean waves turning rocks into sand. Our hardened ideologies softening and opening to other patterns of reasoning. Neptune is idealistic and spiritual, but it’s also an invitation to truly bonkers conspiracy theories, and these don’t mix well with the speed of social media. The last Saturn-Neptune conjunction in 1989, in Capricorn, dissolved the Berlin Wall, ending the decades-long Cold War and our entrenched ideas about who our enemies are/were. The West saw this as a win for capitalism, and called it the “end of history,” but astrologers understand that Mark Twain was right and that history may not repeat itself, but it rhymes.
Combined with Uranus in Gemini’s effects on media and the technology that delivers it (more on that in a bit) the Saturn-Neptune conjunction could dissolve our remaining tether to reality. I’m thinking of the racist riots in the UK in the summer of 2024, ignited by a far-right conspiracy post on Telegram, but at a more global scale. Viral conspiracy tweets generated by bots with deep fake AI videos in order to provoke violence, for example, but in multiple cities at once. Don’t put it past Elon/Vladimir/Trump to do this to get what they want.
This, in concert with the far right’s attempt to erase history, with Holocaust denialism on the rise, with the book bans of the last few years becoming systemic as Project 2025 takes root in our education system, scares me the most. This is why I’m telling everyone not just to support their local libraries and school libraries, but to create free libraries in micro-neigborhoods near their homes. We should be buying hard copies of our favorite books, especially history and science books. The worst version of this nightmare, with Saturn and Neptune in Aries, looks like not just book bans, but mass book burnings and deletions of our archives and histories. (Incidentally, while you’re buying books, if you haven’t already, buy as many vibrators/sex toys as you can afford and store, because I suspect that the Christian Nationalists in power will do whatever is possible to make them illegal using the Comstock Act next year.)
Mars and Venus and the Urgency of Desire
Mars, ruler of Aries and Scorpio, is retrograde in Leo as the year begins, and quickly opposes Pluto in Aquarius, as it did just a few days before the election. As I write this yearly forecast, the Mars/Pluto opposition is nearing and the energy is fairly dark and twisted. In the last few days there have been two plane crashes, with one of the aircraft shot down by Russia in Azerbaijan. (Putin and his wannabe empire figure heavily into the astrology of the rest of the year, so I find this timing interesting.)
Within hours of the exact opposition, Venus enters Pisces, where she is exalted and lives most freely as her best self, and where she will move through part of her upcoming retrograde in March and April, undoing, refining and reviewing some of what we experience in January. Note any high notes you hit as the year turns over, especially in relationships or with new crushes, as they may have something to teach you in the months ahead.
On the 6th Mars returns to Cancer, where he is in fall and will live out the remainder of his retrograde, stationing direct on February 23rd. Venus enters Aries on February 4th, where she is also in fall. Both halves of this cosmic consort dyad are uncomfortable in their skins in these signs, and can’t quite reach for desire or pleasure easily as they watch each other from their respective rearview mirrors.
Venus stations retrograde on March 1st, less than 10 days later, as if the masculine is handing off the baton of reflection to the feminine, and both are in weak condition. Mars, meanwhile, doesn’t return to Leo until April 18th. Venus reenters Pisces on March 27th, stations direct in Pisces on April 12th, and returns to Aries on May 1st.
This entire period, from the start of the year until the start of May, may be hard on our relationship to our erotic selves and our relationships with others, making them awkward, halting, and full of miscommunication, but ripe for introspection. And yet our desires could be urgent, LOUD, and insistent, as if we cannot live without the lover we have or the one we wish to have, and yet cannot live with them harmoniously.
Uranus in Gemini, Media Chaos, and Technology’s War on Truth
Uranus enters Gemini on July 7th, for the first time since 1949. We have been in the Age of Air since December of 2020, and now that the planet of technology and revolution is joining Pluto in a sister air sign, we enter a new level of life as videogame. This has a further pixelating effect on our concept of reality, with Saturn and Neptune already blowing it up with the dynamite of confusion, but with supersonic speed in the coming years. As I mentioned earlier, Uranus in Gemini has coincided with three major wars — the Revolutionary War, the Civil War (which also had Neptune in Aries) and World War II.
Uranus: technology and breakthroughs. Gemini: communication. Uranus in Gemini speaks to technological breakthroughs and especially ones that change the way we understand and process world events. In previous Uranus in Gemini periods, Guttenberg worked on his printing press and the telescope was invented. The first newspaper was printed when Uranus was in Gemini in 1605 in Germany. When Uranus was last in Gemini in the 1940s we saw the Manhattan Project and the start of the space age.
Pluto’s presence in Aquarius since 2023 has given us the ubiquity of drones and AI, with a sprinkling of robot dogs and brain chips and UAPs. I expect that after Uranus enters Gemini and forms a trine with Pluto from July to November, we’ll get much more of this, with some stunning surprises. I hope these will not be weapons of war. Flying cars? Communication with alien life forms? New social media platforms that integrate virtual reality? Let’s try to keep it light and safe.
Here’s where things get very messy and complicated. Oligarchs own media empires already and have since Murdoch began building the Fox empire in the 1990s. Their control of our news consumption is one of the main reasons a fascist owned by a techno-authoritarian who runs a social media company will be president in 2025. The ability to spread lies and propaganda quickly and efficiently already exists, but with Uranus in Gemini, my concern is that this takeover will complete — if no one tries to save the free press and preserve democracy. We have seen a lot of obeying in advance from journalists just since November 2024.
The disintegration of institutional media has many causes, but with Uranus in Gemini, people will be desperately hungry for information, eager to download the truth while watching chaos unfurl. The instability out there may in fact make people come home to real journalism again. We can only hope.
The broligarchs and tech overlords may want us to bifurcate and give our eyeballs and ears to the content they think will keep them in power. But if at least one old-school media institution can keep it together, hire enough real journalists and pay them enough to deliver the truth, maybe democracy doesn’t have to die in the darkness of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon cart.
I find myself longing for a newspaper I can both trust and hold in my hands, and a channel I can flip on to see a trained journalist I know is more invested in telling the truth than protecting a billionaire’s yacht. They exist, they want to work, and many of them are working hard right now: they just need to be valued by their bosses and made safe in Trump’s new version of American carnage.
Jupiter in Cancer and Soft, Protective Landings (let’s hope)
Here’s the sweetest spot of the year: lucky Jupiter moves into the cozy comfort of Cancer on June 9th. Jupiter is exalted in Cancer, happiest and most free to be expansive and bold and protective. Last time Jupiter was in Cancer was in 2014, which might feel to you like the last year things felt normal-ish. Even in the midst of so much societal breakdown and chaos, at least we might feel safe in our homes, with our family or chosen family. This is a deeply nourishing and nurturing phase for us just when we need it the most. As we fight the far-right’s violent misogyny, abortion bans and personhood laws, Jupiter’s presence in Cancer could be protective. And if something goes drastically wrong with the food supply (I’m looking at you, H5N1) Jupiter in Cancer could keep us safe and fed.
The Triangle of Transmutation
With Saturn and Neptune newly in Aries, Pluto fully in Aquarius since the fall of 2024, and Uranus moving into Gemini in July of 2025, we have a spectacular and rare planetary formation in fire and air signs that my fellow astrologers have been trying to come up with a name for. British astrologer Jessica Davidson wrote a great explainer on this stunning lineup and the history of the planetary cycles that inform it. In short, we’ve been dancing in and around it since 2023 with planets in orb, and will be in its grips through 2028. From August 20th to September 14th, Saturn and Neptune at 0 and 1 degree of Aries will sextile Pluto at 1 degree of Aquarius and Uranus at 1 degree of Gemini (Pluto and Uranus are in trine formation with one another). We can look at these as soft aspects between hard planets.
One vision I have for this alignment is a gigantic tent with four planetary poles, Saturn and Neptune right next to each secured by stakes in Aries, Uranus securing the Gemini pole, with Pluto over there in Aquarius holding it down. The tent is all of humanity weaving together a massive net of protection across the globe, because we can finally see the stakes.
What will this mean for us? The only thing that’s certain is uncertainty, at least for a few years as we figure it out together. If Saturn and Neptune close together in Pisces gave us blurred lines, their stake in this sextile feels more like the fog of war. So much happening all at once, things moving so fast that you can’t see the outline of the moving objects. All while Uranus in Gemini explodes the very idea of information, and how we receive and process it, and Pluto continues to generate advanced technology that we don’t yet know how to use compassionately.
In the last few months, from Luigi Mangione to the labor movement to Democrats finally talking about oligarchy (even though Bernie has been talking about it for years), a conversation about class consciousness is emerging. One of my hopes for 2025 and beyond is that we make this real and felt, with deep roots, before the disintegration I’ve been describing sets in. It may just be that globalization erodes, our products no longer come from China, and that everything we build and interact with is much closer to home (this is another potential offering from Jupiter in Cancer).
With everything collapsing all around us, perhaps there is a way to co-create a new reality for the first time in several centuries. For a few years, I’ve talked about Pluto in Aquarius as one of our best opportunities to make “the people have the power” into our lived experience on Earth, and this triangle of transmutation is one of the ways I find myself hoping for the best this coming year.
I’m going to add a bit to this general forecast (more on the August hot zone, the eclipses, and the fall period, when most of the outer planets return to their 2024 placements) in the coming days, including the sign-by-sign yearly forecasts for paid subscribers over the next week or so, as I finish up my January forecast. LOTS to write, still!
Wishing you, my beloved reader and subscriber, a happy, safe, blessed New Year.
With pleasure,
Stefanie