Aries

Aries is the first sign of the tropical zodiac, the cardinal fire that opens when the Sun crosses the March equinox. Day and night stand in balance, and in the northern hemisphere the light is about to lengthen. The sign's image is the ram: a creature that meets an obstacle by putting its head down and going through. That image is a style, not a costume a person is required to wear.

Cardinal signs begin. Fire signs begin with heat, speed, and a preference for action over a finished plan. Aries is both, so its weather is the weather of a start. In a chart it describes a way of entering: direct, impatient with a long preamble, and more truthful in motion than in a careful speech. Classical temperament language calls this hot and dry. Heat pushes outward. Dryness separates one thing from the next. The combination wants a clean edge and a first step.

Mars rules Aries, and Mars also rules Scorpio in the traditional scheme. Mars is the planet of heat, severance, and the will that cuts a path. In Aries that planet is in domicile, at home, able to act in its own manners. The Sun is exalted in Aries. Exaltation is a guest dignity. The Sun is an honored guest, classically strongest near 19 degrees of the sign, where light and the power to begin reinforce each other. Venus is in detriment in Aries, opposite her domicile in Libra. Saturn is in fall here, opposite his exaltation in Libra. Detriment and fall describe a poor fit between a planet's usual style and this sign's weather. The chart then asks for more craft before that planet has an easy room. They are not a mark against the person.

The natural house of Aries, the place that shares its topics in the oldest sign-to-house scheme, is the first house: body, helm, and the way a life steps into a room. A planet in the sign of Aries is not automatically in the first house. Sign is weather. House is place. Aries can fall on any house, and the house says which area of life wears this starting heat.

People often meet Aries as a personality label. A birth chart is more specific. The Sun in Aries, the Moon in Aries, and Mars in Aries are three statements. The Sun describes conscious vitality and the style of will that wants to be seen. The Moon describes how feeling arrives and what the body treats as safety. Mars describes the pursuit and the fight. If the Ascendant is Aries, the rising sign colors the first impression and the start of the houses, and that reading needs a birth time.

Aries squares the other cardinal signs, Cancer and Capricorn, and it opposes Libra. The square is friction between two ways of beginning. The opposition is the old pair of self and other: Aries moves from its own heat, Libra from the balance of a pair. Trines run to Leo and Sagittarius, the other fire signs, where the same element meets itself and the action comes with less argument. None of these aspects is a moral grade.

In practice, Aries in a chart is a place where starting is the honest motion. The sign favors the first clean move. For the ruler, read Mars. For the exaltation, read the Sun. For the place that shares these topics, read the first house.