♈ Aries

Aries is the spark of the zodiac: the first sign, all beginnings, courage and raw drive. It acts on instinct and would rather start than wait.

Aries at a glance

• DatesMarch 21 – April 19
• ElementFire
• ModalityCardinal
• Ruling planetMars
• PolarityPositive
• ArchetypeThe Warrior / The Pioneer

Aries dates, to the minute

The Sun is in Aries from about 21 March to 19 April. The exact moment moves by up to a day from one year to the next, because a year is not a whole number of days. These are the moments the Sun crosses into Aries and out again, computed by the same engine that casts every chart on this site.

Times are Universal Time (UTC). Your own clock can put the change on the day before or the day after. Born on one of these days? The Sun sign then depends on the minute, and a chart cast with your birth time settles it.

What Aries is like

Aries is the first sign, and it behaves like one. Nothing has happened yet. Nothing has gone wrong yet. That is where both the courage and the impatience come from: no part of Aries has learned that a thing might not work.

The instinct arrives before the reasoning. An Aries decision is often made in the body half a second before the mind catches up and builds the case for it, and the case is usually sound, because the instinct was. This is a sign that finds out what it thinks by moving.

It is not, despite the reputation, a sign about aggression. It is a sign about going first: being the one who speaks, wants, or moves before anyone has agreed it is safe to. That takes more nerve than it gets credit for. Aries carries the risk of the first move so the rest of the room does not have to.

Cardinal fire. It starts things, which is not the same as finishing them, and Aries knows it.

In the body, Aries is linked to the head, face and brain.

What it costs

The speed that starts things has to start them again tomorrow. The middle of anything, the long unglamorous stretch after the excitement and before the result, is where Aries borrows patience from somewhere else in the chart. It is usually there. It is rarely here.

And the anger is fast. It arrives whole, says the true thing at the worst possible moment, and is genuinely finished ten minutes later, which the other person is not. That mismatch does more damage than the anger does.

None of this needs fixing. Fast anger is a clean signal that a line has been crossed. It wants somewhere to land that is not a person you love.

Your Sun sign is one placement of ten

If you are here because you were born in early April, you have just read about one planet. Your Sun is the spine of the chart, what you are here to become, but your Moon has a sign of its own, and so do Mercury, Venus, Mars and the rest.

An Aries Sun with a Pisces Moon and an Aries Sun with a Capricorn Moon are not the same person, and both are entirely Aries. A chart is a list of ingredients, not a portrait.

Born with the Sun in Aries

Twelve of the most looked-up people among the famous charts on this site, each with the Sun in Aries at any hour of their birthday:

Each one is a full chart, with the Moon and every planet, so you can see how differently the same Sun sign sits in twelve lives.

Where Aries sits in your chart, whatever your sign

Every chart contains all twelve signs, so Aries is somewhere in yours whether or not you were born under it. It sits on one of your houses, one area of life, even when no planet stands there.

Traditionally that house is read as the room you walk into without knocking. Find which one is yours, then check it against yourself: is there a corner of your life nobody has ever once had to talk you into?

Aries on the eastern horizon at the minute you were born makes a Aries rising sign, a different placement from a Aries Sun and one that needs your birth time: what a rising sign is.

Aries season, in the sky

The Sun enters Aries at the March equinox: the moment its path crosses the celestial equator heading north. That crossing is not a tradition, it is a measurement, and it is what defines 0 degrees of Aries. The tropical zodiac counts from that point rather than from the constellation of the same name.

It is also why the dates move by a day between years. An equinox is an event, not a date, and it lands between the 19th and the 21st of March. So Aries season is the sky's new year in a literal sense: the origin the whole coordinate system is measured from.

Mars, the sign's ruler

Aries is ruled by Mars, which means Mars is where any particular chart shows you how it does Aries. The sign and house Mars occupies describe the style of the drive. Mars in Libra is still Mars, still going first, but it goes first towards a person.

If you have an Aries Sun, Mars is the planet to read second.

Aries compatibility

Aries with Aries · Taurus · Gemini · Cancer · Leo · Virgo · Libra · Scorpio · Sagittarius · Capricorn · Aquarius · Pisces.

A pairing of Sun signs is the coarsest version of compatibility. Two whole charts compared planet by planet is where the detail is.

Aries also touches

beginnings, action, competition, sport, conflict, pioneers, anger, courage, the ego's first move.

A question to sit with

Where are you waiting for permission you could just give yourself?