Equinox part 2: Aries Rising, Worlds Dividing
A second take on the equinox while reflecting on geopolitics
I’ve been sitting with this equinox chart for a few days now, and I keep coming back to the same feeling. Not dread, exactly. Something more like the feeling you get when you wake up and can’t immediately tell whether the light outside is early morning or late afternoon. You’re oriented enough to function. You’re not oriented enough to know where you actually are.
That’s the sky right now. And I think it’s also the world.
The moment the Sun crossed into Aries on the 20th — the exact second spring began — it brought company. Saturn, Neptune, the Moon, Venus, Chiron: six bodies all rising together over the horizon, all in that same bold, forward-charging, warrior-energy sign. On paper, this looks like a statement. A declaration. We are here, we are moving, the year begins now.
But here’s what I keep turning over.
Saturn is structure. It’s the part of experience that insists on accountability, on consequences, on things being real and solid and bounded by time. When Saturn shows up, you’re supposed to know where the walls are.
Neptune is fog. It’s the part of experience where things dissolve — where what looks solid turns out to be idea, where the confident voice turns out to be running on hope rather than facts, where authority mistakes its own conviction for the terrain it’s actually crossing.
Right now, those two are sitting at exactly the same degree. Not close to each other. At the same degree. They’ve been building toward this for years — this is one of the rarer conjunctions, happens about once every thirty-six years — and this is the Aries Equinox where it’s most exact, most present, most woven into the fabric of the year’s opening.
Structure and fog, fused together. That’s not a metaphor I’m reaching for. That’s the thing I keep seeing when I look at what’s actually happening.
Think about the war.
The United States launched a major military campaign against Iran on February 28th. The targets were specific: air defense systems, missile sites, nuclear infrastructure, leadership figures. The force was overwhelming. By most military assessments, the kinetic objectives were being achieved with precision.
And yet — the question that hasn’t been answered, the question that gets louder each week — is what happens next. Not “what are we bombing” but “what changes because of this?” What political outcome makes this over? What would Iran have to do, or agree to, or become, for this campaign to have a terminus rather than just a duration? The administration has been clear about the targets. It has been silent, or contradictory, about the endgame. That’s Saturn-Neptune in Aries. Enormous structural force, permeated by the fog of no strategic theory of what any of it produces.
The war is now burning approximately eleven billion dollars every week. The Strait of Hormuz — the narrow passage through which a fifth of the world’s maritime oil trade normally moves — has been functionally shut down. Not blocked by a physical chain, but made so dangerous by mines and drone strikes that insurance companies pulled out, tanker bookings dropped by sixty percent, and oil prices crossed a hundred dollars a barrel. These effects are spreading. Europe is feeling them in energy costs. Asia is feeling them in supply chains. The Global South is feeling them in food prices. The ripple is real, and it’s moving.
Mars — the planet of force, the warrior energy, the ruler of all this Aries fire — is not in Aries right now. Mars is in Pisces, in the most interior and hidden part of the sky. This is the planet that should be leading the charge, in the sign of confusion, in the house of hidden enemies and self-undoing.
I mean that literally: there’s a sector of the sky associated with things that work against you from the inside, from below visibility, from angles you weren’t watching. And the warrior is operating from there.
Force without clarity of terrain. Action from a place the actor can’t fully see. That’s Epic Fury. That’s the military campaign designed by a culture that replaced analytical expertise with kinetic confidence, that fired the career officials who asked “then what?”, that went to war with the doctrine but without the exit architecture that doctrine always historically required.
The war will continue as long as the force can be sustained. What it’s producing besides force is the question no one in the administration seems to have a clear answer to.
Here’s the thing about this sky that doesn’t make the front page.
While the first house blazes with Aries energy — loud, bold, front-facing, dominating the news cycle — a quieter cluster sits in the hidden part of the chart: Mercury moving backward, sitting on the point that represents the collective’s actual path forward, both of them in the sign of depth and concealment, in the house that literally governs what operates below the threshold of visibility.
The planet of the mind, moving backward. On the destiny point. In the fog.
I think about the Epstein files. Five point two million pages released by the Department of Justice, announced with the full theatrical language of accountability and transparency. And then: the files were so voluminous that no institution could comprehensively review them. Specific files — including files referencing the current president — appear to have been withheld. At least sixteen files disappeared from the DOJ website after posting. The surveillance footage from the prison where Epstein died, released as “full raw,” turned out to have been processed through video editing software, with roughly three minutes of source content absent in the released version.
The archive that should illuminate is the archive that obscures. The disclosure that performs transparency while executing concealment.
Mercury retrograde on the destiny point in the hidden house says: what the collective needs to process, it has not yet processed. The path forward runs through the hidden record, not around it. The managed fog isn’t incidental to the governance of this moment. It is the governance.
But there’s something else in this chart that I keep returning to because it’s genuinely different in quality from everything I’ve described so far.
Jupiter — the planet of abundance and protection — is in Cancer right now, and Cancer is the sign where Jupiter does its best work. It’s expansive, nourishing, genuinely protective. It sits in the part of the chart associated with foundations, with home, with the actual ground beneath things.
And this, to me, is where the counter-story lives.
In California, a law passed in January — the No Kings Act — that creates a mechanism for residents to sue federal agents in state courts for constitutional violations. A gap that the Supreme Court’s recent immunity rulings had opened, now closed at the state level. New York passed legislation protecting itself from having out-of-state National Guard units deployed within its borders without the governor’s consent. A coalition of states is in the early stages of building formal cooperative agreements — compacts the Constitution explicitly permits — to coordinate resistance to federal overreach.
These aren’t headlines in the same way the war is a headline. They’re quieter. They’re rooted. They’re built at the scale of home and community and the governance of actual people in actual places. But they have real structural force in this moment. The exalted Jupiter in Cancer isn’t a decoration. It’s a description of where the genuine staying power is.
Below all of this, something slower is happening.
Pluto — which moves so slowly it spends roughly twenty years in a single sign — is in Aquarius now, and will be until 2043. The last time it was there was the era of the American and French Revolutions. The rewiring, at the deepest structural level, of how power was organized and distributed. New architecture replacing what it dismantled.
Right now, a parallel financial system is being built. China, Russia, Iran, and several other countries have developed and deployed the mBridge Project — a blockchain-based settlement system that processes international financial transactions without routing through SWIFT, the Belgium-based messaging network that has been the backbone of global finance for five decades. SWIFT is what the United States uses when it imposes financial sanctions: exclude a country from SWIFT and you exclude it from the global financial system. That coercive leverage depends entirely on SWIFT remaining the only game in town.
By the first quarter of 2026, approximately thirty percent of global energy trade was settling through mBridge and similar systems rather than SWIFT. That’s the threshold at which the alternative becomes commercially self-sustaining — no longer dependent on the political will of its sponsors to survive. Pluto in Aquarius. The underground rewiring of the collective network, proceeding while the surface architecture maintains its official form.
The dollar-denominated order looks intact. Below the surface, its monopoly is being dismantled in real time.
The thing the chart shows most clearly is also the thing I find hardest to sit with: there are genuinely two worlds operating simultaneously right now, and they are not converging.
One is everything in that first house — the bold assertions of authority, the military campaign, the immunity rulings, the surveillance architecture, the emergency fiscal mechanisms, the Friendly Takeover doctrine applied to Venezuela and Cuba. Enormous force. Enormous confidence. Fog built in.
The other is the quieter world: the encrypted communications between lawyers and organizers, the mBridge transactions routing outside the visible system, the European researchers relocating to institutions that still protect academic freedom, the state legislatures passing laws the federal executive hasn’t found a way to fully stop, the 5.2 million pages containing something important that managed disclosure is trying to prevent anyone from fully reading.
The sky at this equinox doesn’t resolve the tension between these two worlds. It holds both without synthesis, without resolution, without telling us which one carries the future.
What it does say — if I’m reading it honestly — is that the collective’s path forward runs through the hidden and the interior, not through the loud and the forward-charging. That the ground holding the year is Cancerian: rooted, communal, built for the sustenance of actual lives. That the warrior in the fog is operating without a map. And that what has been concealed in the archive matters more than the volume of what has been released.
I started by saying the year feels like waking up and not being able to tell whether the light is morning or evening.
I think what I mean is: the people in charge seem very certain about which one it is. And the sky is suggesting that their certainty and their visibility are not the same thing.
The year is beginning. That much is clear. What it’s beginning toward — that’s still in the fog.