New Moon / Solar Eclipse in Aquarius on February 17th, 2025

Moving out of Pisces fantasy dreaming and into Aries engine kick-starting, using the tool of Aquarian world-building and chain-link collectivism.

There is so much happening this week! On the 17th, there is a new moon in Aquarius. This new moon is also a solar eclipse, which will be followed by a lunar eclipse in Virgo in March. Also on the 17th, the Lunar New Year begins, shifting from the year of the Wood Snake to the year of the Fire Horse. On the 20th, Saturn and Neptune meet in an exact conjunction in the first degree of Aries. There is so much newness this week, a lot of re-birth into a new awakening, and it is not without its stressors. Next week, on the 26th, Mercury goes retrograde in Pisces, a tugging us back into the previous time’s way of being, which in Pisces has been an obscuring of physical reality in favor of belief and faith, a wishful approach. We may have to reconcile undeniable truths this week, as well as our desire for existing within a fantasy that is unsupported by facts and therefore cannot be the blueprint for moving forward. There may be grief here, a mourning of the magical thinking that you used to trust in.

Moving from Pisces into Aries, as Saturn and Neptune have been gradually doing over the past year, means moving from delusion to reality, and from hope and faith, abstract feeling, into action. It is the beginning of a new cycle, and while we can still use our old tools from the previous one, we will need to expand our reach and find new tools to succeed in this new level of reality. Moving from Snake to Horse is also a transition from introversion to externalized action. Aries, and action, doesn’t have to exclude introspection or ephemeral feeling, but it does require a pivot. Emotions no longer make up the bubble we live in, now they need to work as fuel for action. Existing mostly inside your head or in the abstract landscape of online existence isn’t going to work anymore. It isn’t going to feel right, and it won’t move you forward. The environment has changed and what is supported is different than it used to be. The Aquarius new moon is a guide here, for a new playbook that can meet this moment. We can’t manifest a new reality using only our energy, and we can’t keep doing the same things we used to, we do need to discover a new approach.

Aquarius is a sign of radical change, of decentralization, of utopian shared collectivism. It can feel on the surface like something wants to be taken from us and given to others, but this is not really it. Remember that Aquarius is the water-bearer, which has symbolic correlation with the Star card in the Tarot. It is about giving and sharing, but this kind of sharing does not take from you, it grows you bigger and brighter. It is a collectivism that you benefit from too. It is the opposite of withholding or hoarding. It is giving freely, not because you have accumulated so much that you can give some to me, but because the definitions of what is yours and what is mine have changed. This is a revolution in thinking, a reorganization of mental constructs around wealth, borders, property, access. The old ways of revolution, which don’t succeed, still rely on the old hierarchical constructs, making small adjustments here and there but maintaining the status quo. Aquarius has big ideas that come through in small everyday gestures that gently promote this reorganization. Aquarius genuinely wants what is best for others at the same intensity and emotional investment as it wants the best for itself, and this can be hard to understand, because in order to be sustainable with this egalitarian approach to community, Aquarius appears to not care. It is not performative about its beliefs, because they are organic, not learned behaviors. It is not dramatic or overt.

This is not New Year, New You, this is allowing the You that was always there to assert itself within the web of humanity, without self-critique and self-judgement. The bookend to this eclipse will be in Virgo, who tends towards self-critique and self-judgement, so you can save those feelings to sort out then. For now, use the Aquarius new moon to do a new type of dreaming, more akin to world-building. This is sci-fi imagining of a new landscape of possibility, not the esoteric grasping for what always slips out of reach.

Aquarius takes emotions and places them into a context of being and doing where they are natural and just a part of things. Emotions are not special, because to Aquarius, nothing is more special than anything else. Everything is special, nothing is special; being special is simply not a concern. This can read as detached, but when we are thinking about the whole of living beings that make up the world, this viewpoint can be read as full of acceptance, allowance, a different kind of support than we are used to. Many of us want to feel special in some way, but when it comes down to it, does our feeling special require that others are not special in their way, to themselves? This is amplified on the global stage, to a ridiculous extreme that fascism does so well. In order for one group to feel good about themselves, another has to be denigrated, denied their humanity, gotten rid of. The other becomes a threat to one’s own specialness, but if it is so easily threatened by the existence of another, how can it truly be specialness? The very action of fascism negates the premise of superiority. White people who can’t stand the excellence of Black people or immigrants, Zionists who can’t stand the excellence of Palestinians, men who can’t stand the excellence of women, they all prove the fragility of their superiority complexes just through this inability to co-exist.

Someone who feels good about themselves while standing next to someone very different from themselves, who also feels good about themselves, is at peace with their sense of self. Aquarius, the most mature air sign, does not need anything from anyone else. That does not mean that with Aquarius we don’t want, or feel, or desire. It just means that our existence is bound to others only through connectivity, not through hierarchies of access. We participate together, but we don’t require things of each other. We breathe the same air and therefore we hope that there are some common goals to protect that air we share, but I do not need to take your air, and you do not need to take my air.

As the middle child of three girls, I know the desire to feel special at the expense of others, but this was only because I felt at the mercy of an inherent hierarchy, and I believed that there were limits to the care available to me, mostly because I was not empowered to create my own care. Culturally, we are deep into a dark spiral of grasping for ways to feel more special than others, even without fascism pushing us there. Despite small jumps forward in the recent past, appearance and all of its signifiers of wealth and status is back in the forefront of culture. Women are being terrorized by media, again, to fit specific molds of smallness and control. Men are also terrorized by this, but are afforded more power along with their submission to control. People of color are literally being terrorized in their homes and streets and workplaces. Rage is hard to manage in the waters of Pisces, but with Aries and the Fire Horse, it finds its way. The fact that Aquarius is leading the way of this shift into fire feels like a message. We can use the values of Aquarius to guide our fire on its forward momentum: exercising hopeful imagination, accessing previously unknown solutions, joining together in equitable community. Simply allowing people to live their lives, staying in our own lanes, opening access to all and detaching from our needs that are based in fear. Putting in right effort, focusing on what is present and around us, dissolving blocks for ourselves and others.

I think of Aquarius energy as the links of a chain. Each link is important, as the chain will fall apart if just one breaks, but no link is more important than another. And what makes the chain work, to hold things close and to create security, is all the links being strong and functional in their own right while also joining together.