Aries
20 March – 19 April
The first degree of spring — everything here starts before it is ready.
- Element
- fire
- Modality
- cardinal
- Ruling planet
- Mars
- Keywords
- initiative · nerve · impatience
Aries opens at the spring equinox, which is the whole of it: the year turning over and going, with nothing yet built. A planet in Aries acts first and finds out afterwards. That is a real advantage when the situation rewards being early and a real cost when it rewards being right.
Ruled by Mars, cardinal by modality, so it initiates rather than sustains. What lands here gets speed, appetite and a short fuse; what it does not get is patience for the second half of anything. Read an Aries placement as the part of the chart that would rather be wrong quickly than correct eventually.
The other fire signs are Leo and Sagittarius. Its meaning echoes in the first house, which covers the same ground as an area of life rather than a manner.
Where Aries actually falls in your own chart — and which planets are standing in it — takes about a minute to work out, free and without an account.