Neptune Saturn in Aries – hope for better

Neptune moves into Aries in conjunction with Saturn from April/May 2025 onwards. Below a reprise of earlier posts.

Neptune, planet of spirituality, illusion, delusion, deception, creativity and vision moves out of its own sign Pisces, where it has been since 2011, into Aries in 2025 staying till 2038.

Looking back on historical events linked to Neptune in Aries:

1861 – 1874: Most notably this covered the American Civil War, which arose after the abolition of slavery, which had been banned in Europe decades earlier.

  Abraham Lincoln was shot in the head (ruled by Aries) and died.

In Russia Alexander 11 signed the Emancipation Act liberating serfs in 1861.

The Bahai faith was founded as was the forerunner to the Salvation Army and the Geneva Convention established the Red Cross.

‘Neptune in Aries may be about individuals submitting themselves to a bigger cause than themselves. It does seem to coincide, in the Western world at least with an increase in individual rights and was one of advancements for formally disenfranchised people.’

The first UK trade union was legalised in 1872 and in the U.S. the “Knights of Labor” was set up. The U.K. Education Act of 1870 bringing in elementary schooling for all children and legislation on child labour. The USA gave voting rights to all ethnicities. The UK Married Women’s Property Act allowed married women to retain their earnings and inherit.

Italy was unified in 1860 and Canada came into being.

Prince Albert dies, Victoria’s consort and the ‘uncrowned king of GB.’

In the UK parliament, the inspired leadership of Benjamin Disraeli pushed forward with parliamentary reform.

Famines in Finland, Sweden and India – of greater magnitude than usual.

1697 – 1710: The ill-fated Darien Scheme, which lost 20% of Scotland’s money, led to the Act of Union with England in 1707.

The Act of Settlement in 1701 establishing the succession to the English throne, put the childless protestant Queen Anne on the throne, leading on her death to the establishment of the Hanoverian Monarchy in 1714.

Peter 1 Great regenerated Russian society and started expansion westward.

Famines of greater magnitude than usual in Estonia, Sweden and Finland, the last wiping out almost a third of the population. Two million die of famine in India; 250,000 die in East Prussia and 600,000 in France.

1533 to 1547: Henry VIII is excommunicated by Pope Clement VII and the split from Rome establishes the Anglican Church.

Wales becomes part of the Kingdom of England.

Henry declares himself and his heirs as Kings of Ireland, replacing the Lordship of Ireland with the Kingdom of Ireland.

1370 to 1383: In England, the ‘Good Parliament’ attempted to highlight the corruption of the Royal court and to reform the government. John of Gaunt, the effective ruler, replaced it the next year with a ‘Bad Parliament’ which undid the advances.  

1206 to 1219: The English Barons force King John to sign the Magna Carta, in an attempt to curb the power of the monarch.

1042 to 1056: Westminster Abbey built, 1050. East-West schism in Catholic Church.

Edward the Confessor became King of England and restored the Saxon line after the Danes had conquered England under Cnut. As in 1533 England took a break from the European continent though it did not last long.

878 to 892: England has become unified for the first time under Alfred the Great a few years before (871).

SATURN NEPTUNE CONJUNCTIONS come round roughly three times a century in 1989 in Capricorn, in 1953 in Libra and in 1917/18 in Leo. The next one falls in Aries in 2026.

Andre Barbault writes about the hopeful side of the 2025/26 Saturn Neptune conjunction: “It is the most benefic configuration of the century and the interplanetary partnership will work for the best in a splendid relaunch of civilization. It contains a harmonious relationships between primordial polar opposites, the coming together of the external and internal, rational and spiritual, mind and soul …. human beings surpassing themselves while experiencing life on a higher level. “

  Historically Saturn and Neptune together have been associated with the fight for womens’ and workers’ rights, epidemics, religious events and collapsing empires.

   The English Peasants’ Revolt during the Saturn–Neptune conjunction in Aries in 1381, demanding an end to serfdom was suppressed and its leader, Wat Tyler, beheaded. Two conjunctions later, in Virgo, Irish rebel Jack Cade leading the Kent and Essex peasants’ revolt, was also killed. Another two conjunctions further on, in Pisces in 1524, there were extensive peasants’ revolts in Germany.

   By 1845 with Saturn–Neptune in tolerant Aquarius, Engels was writing The Condition of the Working Class in England. Still under the same influence, the Irish potato-crop failure of the following year drew attention to the plight of the starving and the suffering. By the next conjunction in Taurus in 1881, British prime minister William Gladstone had passed the Irish Land Act to prevent excessively high rents, although the outrages of 1882, when 10,500 Irish farming families were evicted, gave every indication that Saturnine rigidity and greed still held sway. In the United States, the American Federation of Labor was founded in Pittsburgh in 1881.

   One conjunction on, in 1917 in Leo, striking Russian workers rose up, and were joined by soldiers to overthrow the last feudal tsardom.

   During the last Saturn–Neptune conjunction of the 20th century, in Capricorn in 1989, Solidarity, the Polish workers’ party, came to power in democratic elections. The fall of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe freed workers to control their own lives and government. There was also mass rehabilitation of Russian citizens who were victims of Stalin’s brutal purges, Stalin himself having succumbed on the Saturn–Neptune conjunction of 1953. Also in 1989, the Tiananmen Square demonstration in China, staged by students and workers, was brutally suppressed, resulting in 2000 deaths. In Britain just a year later there were the violent Poll Tax Riots, the first serious mass revolt against the government in decades.’

  There’s always a dual nature to them – Neptune undermining health and Saturn finding new remedies. Suppression of heretic religious leaders and the building of cathedrals. They oversaw successive peasants’ revolts in England and the Russian 1917 revolution; and the crowning of Queens and the enactment of legal protections for women.

  Although Saturn Neptune doesn’t sound rebellious it tends to bring the state and the status quo (Saturn) into conflict with spiritual movements or the underdogs (Neptune). The flower power, hippie movement was very much a Saturn Neptune in Libra phenomenon in the 1950s. 

  The 20^th Century ones aren’t necessarily a good guide since the 1989 one was a triple conjunction with Uranus; and the 1953 had Saturn Neptune square Uranus.

  The 1917/18 Saturn Neptune oversaw the Spanish flu epidemic which wiped out more people in a single year than the Middle Ages black death plague had done.  

     Saturn in Aries tends to be tough and hard, producing circumstances that require self-reliance; Saturn Pluto is war-like and deprived; Neptune Pluto fosters megalomania. But there’ll be enough good in there to produce positive changes (Saturn Uranus), creative inspiration (Uranus Neptune) and the perseverance to make at least some benefits of new thinking stick.

WOMEN’S RIGHTS

All countries have their own specific arc of history but looking at the UK, the first key change towards the emancipation of women came with the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, with Saturn Neptune together in Taurus, which gave wives for the first time the right of separate ownership. Then on the next conjunction in 1917–18 in Leo, the campaign for women’s suffrage succeeded in getting the vote for women over the age of 30.

  Both Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne to exert feminine influence over matters of state on Saturn–Neptune conjunctions — in 1558 in Taurus, and 1953 in Libra. Both of them were enduring monarchs in typical Saturnine fashion, Elizabeth I ruling for 45 years, the present Queen still in place after 70 years.  Benazir Bhutto became the first woman prime minister of Pakistan on the conjunction in Capricorn in 1988, though it proved a short-lived triumph.

In a previous Saturn Neptune in Aries in 1702/1703 England’s Queen Anne took over as monarch from her brother-in-law William of Orange to reign for five years.

  Literature also rose to the challenge and produced memorable novels by or about women – Jane Austen Sense and Sensibility, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer and Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses; Molière’s The Misanthrope and The Dumb Lady. More recently Pedro Almodovar, the Spanish film-maker, produced his cult movie Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown.

  Not that anything happens without a backlash and Saturn Neptune also has associations with the persecution of witches – arising from the masculine Saturnine fear of the mysterious, less rational feminine in Neptune.