Saturn in Aries: The Edge of the Beginning

Focus: On May 24th, 2025, just before midnight Eastern Time, Saturn enters Aries.
He will not leave until the spring of 2028. And though he is fallen here and not at home in this fire sign, Saturn in Aries comes bearing the gravity of a new age.

It won’t announce itself with fanfare. There will be no neat beginning, no single megaphone blast to say: “New Age O’clock.” But think about it, did they know exactly when the Renaissance started? Or, did they realize one day, years in,  that the Middle Ages had ended because they were decisively in a new time with new challenges and opportunities and features? From the moment Saturn crosses that threshold, a slow ignition begins. Dry ground cracks, dead branches catch, certain long foreseen sparks find air. According to some mystics, we are stepping into the Aeon of the Child, not in the coddled sense but in the mythic and initiatory one. The previous age was one of power Over, of domination, hierarchy and slavery. Even benignly it was still expressed as power Over the self or lower self or flesh. The new age will be built on power With, on trust, communication and cohesion. 

Saturn, god of boundaries, time, and harvest, moves into the sign of raw becoming. This is both a culmination of the long running patterns that have brought us here, both personally and in the collective history, and the beginning of an entirely new, fresh cycle. In our lives, and in our cultures and countries. 

We’ve just emerged from Saturn in Pisces, a three-year submersion into the waters of grief, spiritual fatigue, and mythic unraveling. For many, especially those with night charts, this was a period of literal muteness, as Pisces is a mute sign and Saturn here can emphasize that. Structures decayed, often silently. Endings came like dreams forgotten upon waking, giving us a disorienting feeling that made it hard to find solid ground. The general sense of the past few years: when do we stop sinking? The self has sometimes been seen as a burden, a sacrifice at best, and people have endlessly deceived in order to appear as saints. It’s been hard to find the flow to go with as discontentment became universal! But Saturn has begun to lay this culture-wide martyrdom complex to rest, and new approaches will be more effective. Now, as Saturn drags himself onto dry land, he finds his tools rusted, his voice hoarse, but his will and fire returned, purified in the waters of Pisces. And in Aries he begins again, but not with his usual sense of mastery, instead he has the gifts of motion and initiative.

At first, this motion may look like frustration. Saturn is not dignified here. He is not in control, which really bothers this planet even more so than others! In Aries, the desire to fix and to act will be immediate and blunt, at odds with Saturn’s natural desire to work at a slow, deliberate, careful and masterful pace. We can take some Aries wisdom from Alexander the Great. Gordian knots, knots that feel permanently tied up like they could never come loose, are not untied, instead they are cut straight through, as the myth of the Gordian Knot tells us. But we should use wisdom and be careful, because some knots should not be cut. And part of the Saturn-in-Aries trial will be learning when directness serves, and when it severs us from a good outcome.

Still, this decan, ruled by Mars, grants a kind of purposeful destruction. The first part of this transit will be constructive in its burning. Old, decaying structures must fall. Limiting beliefs born of a drowned world, built around apathy, martyrdom, and unnatural self-dissolution, will be dried out and shaken loose, set ablaze. This does not come with a feeling of ease, but for those tuned in the drying out effect could come as a big relief. For mutable placements, it may mark the final chapter in a long transition. For cardinal signs, commitments and challenges will rise like a wall before you but you will also find yourself called to lead. The cliche, “choose your hard” comes to mind.

The ingress chart tells its own story. With Capricorn rising, Saturn rules from the shadows of the fourth house, inviting reflection on identity, land, and the roots we return to. There’s an inward turn gathering strength beneath this moment—a quiet global pull toward self-sufficiency that we will see play out economically as countries and communities begin to reckon with the fragility of distant dependencies. We may see increasing pressure to build where we are, to restore what’s close, rather than rely on distant powers or abstract promises.

But the deeper invitation comes through the axis formed by the lunar nodes, especially in whole sign terms where it cuts across the third and ninth houses. With Saturn this isn’t just material . It is also a philosophical change. A narrative change, in our personal lives and in our collectives. What myths have we borrowed that no longer fit the lives we’re actually living? What beliefs have we imported without questioning their relevance to our time, our bodies, our streets and actual day to day lives?

The South Node in the ninth points to a diminishment of far-flung ideologies and inherited belief systems, not because they are wrong, but because they’ve become weightless and untethered from the lived realities of our time. The North Node in the third urges us to build meaning through local interaction within our physical communities: with our neighbors and our land. We have to restore the health of our community nervous system, to make it less easy to fall off the edges. It points to a restoration of local communication rooted in our day to day lives and connections: spoken, embodied, exchanged between people who know each other, rather than broadcasted abstractly to strangers and promptly disassociated from. A restoring of the importance of knowledge that’s exchanged across shared physical spaces.

It’s not so much about rejecting the global as it is about remembering the local.
You do not have to save the world.
You do need to plant in your own soil.

Saturn is a god of agriculture. Saturn is the farmer, the sower of seeds and reaper of harvest, thus a god of time and cycles. Agriculture builds community and takes a lot of hands. Saturn’s intention here is not solitude, the end of this road is interdependence, not isolation. But healthy relationships require healthy individuals. First, autonomy must be reclaimed—not the hollow kind that rejects connection, but the kind that makes true relationships possible. We need resilient and principled individuals to build resilient communities. We need people who know how to tend land whether physically or relationally. Who hold important and foundational boundaries, who repair, rebuild, and can withstand heat. And that starts small, as disappointing as it is, but that start is near, and many individuals will indeed rise to the plate. Some will be false leaders, liars set up to fall and take foolish people down with them. But real leadership can begin to emerge again under this transit. Aries can’t just sit by, this sign is one that deeply values the ethics of heroism. But heroism, is after all, a reaction to great danger and friction.

Though I’m cautiously optimistic, we must remember that we are entering an age of fire.
And fire begins with friction.

By the time Saturn meets Neptune in Aries in 2026—conjunct for the first time since before recorded history, an alignment last seen when the ancient Egyptians began keeping calendars (Thanks to S.J. Anderson for pointing this out on his YouTube channel)—we will see the very beginnings of this new era. And like then back, we may find that time itself changes shape. That myth, the narratives that direct our lives and countries, reinvents itself and sometimes adapts to new circumstances. That civilization redraws its breath. This is both a generational shift and even deeper, a cosmological reset. It is likely a new paradigm, a new worldview of spirituality and knowledge itself will emerge.

But make no mistake: not everyone shares the same myths anymore. The dream of global unity has fractured before our eyes since Pluto entered Aquarius. Our stories no longer speak in unison, but come from divergent and seemingly  irreconcilable values. For now, they clash, diverge, splinter. To be honest, that may not be fixable, and Aries emphasizes conflict. But the recognition of this divergence, the clarity that we are not, and have never truly been, one monolithic “we”. is the first step toward building something real together. Something that can last not because it demands sameness but because it can hold difference.

So if you feel like everything is falling apart, you’re seeing the pattern correctly.
You’re not crazy. You’re awake.
You’re seeing, maybe for the first time, that the scaffolding you’ve leaned on no longer holds up to the test of time.
This is the edge of a new beginning, and Saturn gives us responsibility for building the next myth we live by, right here and now.

There will be war. There will be resistance. The old structures will not go quietly. Academia in particular will reveal its cracks, Institutions once thought sacred may lose their claim to permanence or even dignity in the eyes of the public. But within the rubble something else will be seeded: the drive to live differently, to structure time around authentic actualization, effort, and embodied truth.

It won’t be easy, Saturn never is.
But you still have agency.
You can still choose what gets built next.
You can still tend to your soil and cultivate your own garden in a way that no one else could, bringing you the unique fruits you need for fulfillment. 

Saturn watches the field. What will you grow?