Whenever I try to write about Neptune in Aries a barrage of storylines and imagery hit me all at once and demand my attention and grab my hand to pull me down rabbit holes. So on brand for this transit. I’ve already written a 3 part blog about it (here’s Part 1), and it’s been hard for me to pinpoint where to continue that thread when there’s so much to say…what might be the most coherent way to share all of these ideas and when and what is the point these storylines are trying to tell me?
Starting March 30, 2025 (6:58AM CT) Neptune dips into Aries for the first time since 1875!
To approach the landscape of this transit, I want to set the scene with some Wild West iconography that feels so perfect for it.
The Unsung Hero is my theme for this transit. I’m not so interested in talking about the Wild Bills and Younger Brothers of the west that have been played out through white washed spaghetti westerns and movies since “the west was won.” I love Tombstone and those movies have their place, but let’s talk about who really made the Wild West…
Who are the unsung heroes of history – the last Neptune in Aries transit – that we can call on to empower us through this upcoming transit?
Why does the Wild West illustrate Neptune in Aries?
“In 19th-century America, the wild west was a dream: of striking it rich, of finding fame, a fresh start, or freedom. It was a place of extremes and contradictions: full of epic landscapes and terrible hardships, independence and lawlessness and swing-door saloons” (The Exploress Podcast).
Honestly is there more to even say to convince you that this time period was emblematic of Aries + Neptune themes?
Let’s first think about who Neptune is…first off, they are tricksy to pin down so here’s my latest interpretation for them.
If Saturn is objective reality, Neptune is the ever-changing lens of perspective. There might be an objective reality but we are all projecting our perspective onto it and in turn basically creating our own realities. As a society, we also choose collective realities to perceive together. The American Dream is a belief (system) so entrancing it has persisted for centuries at this point, beginning with Manifest Destiny (barf) and every American has suffered for its siren song in some way before. The Neptunian influence is like a spell and you have no idea you’re under it until you develop the mental and spiritual tools to step out from the hypnosis. If you learn to develop the tools, its possible to realize the euphoric, expansive agape-type love that Neptune is, but without those tools we are basically stuck in the samskaras of our own making, forever entrenched in our own destructive habits, and thinking that’s all there is.
If Neptune is our (societal) ideals and fantasies, then it can speak to social, political, and cultural shifts – as our collective perspectives and desires shift.
What is Aries? The Aries (Mars) landscape is reminiscent of the western Turtle Island/USA. Extreme, harsh, unforgiving, dry, prickly, uniquely beautiful are words that come to mind.
Conditions that breed people who have to use their resources wisely, observe with all their senses, sharpen their skills and instincts, get their hands dirty, and share what comfort they have to offer under scare circumstances. I’ve written quite a bit about Aries in my Neptune in Aries Predictions: Part 3 so I’ll leave it at this.
Unsung Heroes of the Wild West
The faces that come to mind to characterize this transit are certainly tough, unflinching, threatening, bad ass, demonstrating physical power, self-sufficient, honored for their battle scars, and not afraid to get it out the mud as they say. They will not be held under anyone’s thumb, and will hone whatever skills and make whatever sacrifices they need to in order to maintain their freedoms. I think the latter characteristic feels especially resonant in these times with Pluto in Aquarius happening as well.
Let’s talk about soldiers, cowboys, war chiefs, wild women, queer folks, and immigrants that made the West…
(Side note, in case anyone would have the complaint that none of these “heroes” are morally perfect, I say to you no hero is morally perfect. Everyone is a hero and villain to someone [perspective remember…] and that is precisely the point I think this transit will unveil to us in time.)
Buffalo Soldiers
In 1866 all-black American peace-time regiments were created and eventually adopted the name “Buffalo Soldiers.” The name was dubbed by Native Americans likely because of the courage and ferociousness displayed by these soldiers that reminded tribes of the way buffalo fought. The soldiers were honored by this nickname because they knew how respected buffalo were among native peoples.
African Americans could only serve west of the Mississippi River, because many whites didn’t want to see armed black soldiers in or near their communities. Though still endangered by the violence and false sense of resentment of white comrades and settlers out west, Buffalo soldiers had the opportunity to explore the west, learn skills building infrastructure, hold high ranking positions and gain Medals of Honor. Which, despite the cruel contradiction of having to fight for a country that doesn’t respect them, at the end of the day, I imagine these men could learn skills and grow their life experience in a way that benefited them personally and I hope allowed some of them to live more independently and self-sufficiently while under abhorrent circumstances.
One really cool thing is that Buffalo soldiers were not only amazing fighters but exceptional horsemen. They served as some of the first national park rangers, protecting parks from illegal grazing, poachers, timber thieves, and wildfires, and constructing park infrastructure and trails. Especially lately with the attacks on our national park system and the administration trying (but not succeeding!!) to take people’s jobs, its cool to know that the legacy of protecting national parks began with black americans.
Sources: https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/proud-legacy-buffalo-soldiers
Black Cowboys
Historians estimate that 1 in 4 cowboys were black – though for a long time not many people knew that because Hollywood white washed spaghetti westerns. Black americans, usually first enslaved and then as free men, played a huge influence on the west in true history. After the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation “freeing” black Americans, many of the men who had already been working as cowhands for years on ranches began taking jobs as cowhands. These cowboys skilled at horsemanship and herding cattle were in high demand and asked to drive cattle north across state lines, through wilderness and harsh conditions, and through Native American territories to bring cattle to shipping points up north.
Famous cowboy Nat Love recalls the camaraderie between cowboys he met on the trail, “A braver, truer set of men never lived than these wild sons of the plains whose home was in the saddle and their couch, mother earth, with the sky for a covering,” and that “They were always ready to share their blanket and their last ration with a less fortunate fellow companion and always assisted each other in the many trying situations that were continually coming in a cowboy’s life.” I can’t think of a more Neptune in Aries ideal to live up to than that!
Some cowboys took their skills off the ranch and to the rodeo. Bill Pickett gained an international reputation for his rodeo skills and “bulldogging” steer. Which, if you look that one up, sounds insanely terrifying and difficult. His innovative idea eventually led to steer wrestling, an important rodeo event today. Decades after his death he was finally commemorated for being one of the greatest rodeo riders in the Cowboy Hall of Fame and ProRodeo Hall of Fame.
Sources:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/lesser-known-history-african-american-cowboys-180962144
https://www.billpickettrodeo.com
https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=PI003
Chief Red Cloud
Chief Red Cloud of the Oglala Lakota tribe was born in 1822 in what is now north-central Nebraska. His name is so striking and so alive with Neptune in Aries imagery. In fact many of his successful battles fighting off westward expansion and colonialism happened in the 1860’s while Neptune was in Aries. He was named after an unusual weather event and I can only imagine what his parents thought that sky omen could mean when they decided to name their son after it. Gives me chills.
Red Cloud’s leadership was instrumental in resisting westward expansion against the U.S. government. In the 1860’s Wyoming was at the peak of its own gold rush and settlers, miners an frontiersmen wanted to establish roads/trails through Arapaho and Lakota hunting grounds and routes around the Powder River Basin and northern Wyoming area. After several years of fighting, the U.S. War Department sent troops to the Powder River Basin and tried to get Brulé and Lakota leaders to sign a treaty allowing settlers safe passage through the area. Chief Red Cloud refused to sign the treaty and instead led Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors into battle against U.S. soldiers stationed there. They were successful in beating back troops and the battle become known as the Fetterman massacre. After several more years of successful resistance the U.S. asked Chief Red Cloud to sign a treaty wherein they promised to pull their troops if he promised to be peaceful. They did end up pulling their troops and it was one of the only times they “carried out a peace treaty completely.” Red Cloud signed the treaty, and continued assisting other famous warriors like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse in other battles.
Honestly would love to see Fetterman Massacre t-shirts and when white people get mad about it be like “i’M jUsT hOnoRiNg mY cULtuRe” to mock what white people say about their confederate flag t-shirts.
Sources:
https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/red-clouds-war
https://www.biography.com/political-figures/red-cloud
https://aktalakota.stjo.org/american-indian-leaders/red-cloud
Wild Women
“It was a frontier saying that homesteading was a gamble: ‘Yeah, the United States Government is betting you 160 acres of land that you can’t live on it eight months.’” —Edith Eudora Kohl in her homesteading memoir, Land of the Burnt Thigh Solomon Butcher, Courtesy Library of Congress.
The women who were brought by family and husbands or who chose to venture out west were brave and hard af. If you even survived the journey out west, and even if you had a family or husband that survived alongside you to help and protect you and your homestead, it was harsh, bloody, bone-tiring work. Feeding a family on what little you could grow or hunt, tending to your animals, herding, training and slaughtering them, cutting down trees and gathering materials, learning the skills to build your home, barn, fences, from scratch, making and fixing your own clothes, teaching your kids life skills, dealing with inclement weather, healing the sick and injured, simply surviving year after year mostly without outside medical help. Terrible loneliness. Trying to protect themselves from thieves, sexual assault and murder. Giving birth to children with little outside help. Having to work a farm while having your period with no Advil or tampons?? Absolutely not.
Being a woman in the west though, for all of its challenges, did provide a strange type of freedom that women in more “civilized” areas like the east could not fathom. For women of different races it was more normalized (or at least possible) to be a cowgirl, gunslinger, bounty hunter, soldier, sex worker, brothel madam, or business owner than it was east of the Mississippi.
Cathy Williams served as a man – Pvt. William Cathay in the 1860s as a Buffalo Soldier patrolling the Santa Fe Trail and in the army before that. She said she posed as a man in order to make her own living without having to depend on anyone. She was eventually found out and her story ends up pretty sadly.
Mary Fields “Stagecoach Mary” was the second woman in the U.S. to carry mail – a highly dangerous job fending off robbers and thieves, wolves, and trekking through harsh terrain, dealing with wagon crashes, not to mention dealing with misogyny, and racism. At the age of 60 she applied to work for the US Postal Service. She got the job by being the fastest to hitch up her six-horse team. She seemed like a fiercely loving woman who at one time took a train from her home in Toledo to the Montana wilderness after getting a letter that her friend was dying. She arrived with medicines only to find her friend dead in a broken down cabin, the other nuns and students with frostbite and Indian girls rescued from nearby reservations struggling and stayed to help them. Later in her life she opened a restaurant but went bankrupt because she fed everyone whether they could pay or not.
Eleanor Dumont “Madame Moustache” a French-Creole woman from New Orleans came to California during the gold rush and opened a classy and hugely successful gambling hall. She was a renowned, remarkable card player and respected businesswoman. She opened several establishments like other gambling halls and brothels. She paraded her ladies around in town in carriages to show off their beauty – much to the dismay of wives of the town.
I could go on and on about the different fascinating and amazing women I read about but you can see my resources list below and especially if this topic interests you, read the incredibly well-done and thorough article from The Exploress Podcast.
Clara Brown “Aunt Clara” the laundress, business woman and philanthropist; Luzena Wilson, (shown) Sarah Winnemucca, “Charley” Parkhurst, Josephine Waggoner, Maria Amparo Ruiz, there are so many!
Sources:
https://truewestmagazine.com/article/the-real-women-of-the-wild-west/
https://newsroom.woundedwarriorproject.org/The-Only-Known-Female-Buffalo-Soldier-Cathay-Williams
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2019/08/21/outlaws-adventurers-women-old-west
https://www.cowboysindians.com/2023/09/brave-hearted-women-the-women-of-the-american-west/
https://www.theexploresspodcast.com/episodes/2019/1/6/wild-western-women-ladies-on-the-american-frontier (this article is long and incredibly well done!!)
Queer Folks
The romanticized idea of the Wild West never includes the reality that some settlers went west and were able to explore and be more free in their sexuality, their gender, and live more openly queer lives. Also not often said is that the cultural context of the west was entirely different than elsewhere, and the lack of people in general meant that men and women could live in a way that in other contexts would’ve been deemed inappropriate, but out west were somewhat less unacceptable. Outside of settler culture, a substantial number of native tribes recognized and accepted transgender/two-spirit individuals in the ways that they wanted to live and who they truly were.
Among settlers, women passed or just dressed, as men to avoid being sexually assaulted, avoid criminal charges, to gain more employment opportunities or respect, and to be able to have female partners without being harassed. Some examples are Harry Allen, Sammy Williams and Joseph Lobdell. Men passed as women to be able to have male partners, like Mrs. Noonan and Mrs. Nash, but in certain instances men did not even have to pretend to be women to be able to live somewhat authentically. Things like “bachelor marriages” in towns where there were no women around, or even just traveling with other men and sharing the same hotel room were never questioned. Some identified with their sex assigned at birth and some identified with how they presented in the world, but of course all the labels we have today did not exist so we don’t know how they would’ve identified.
In some instances, because the lines of platonic and romantic relationships were more blurred at the time, whether man or woman, queer relationships were considered “acceptable” as long as you ended up in a hetero marriage.
So whether there were people who, in today’s terms, would’ve identified as queer, gay or trans, or were someone who would’ve identified in today’s terms as basically straight or some derivative of that, social norms were slightly more forgiving than norms back East.
https://www.notesfromthefrontier.com/post/queer-tales-of-the-old-west
https://manchesterhistorian.com/2022/the-wild-and-queer-old-west-race-gender-and-identity-in-the-american-west-by-jason-lee/
https://www.bridgercare.org/blog/the-american-west-was-always-queer
Chinese Immigrants
Chinese immigrants had been arriving to the U.S. in the 18th century but due to a deteriorating economy in southeast China in the mid-nineteenth century, came to the U.S. hoping for better opportunities. The California gold rush presented elusive opportunities for prosperity but white settlers, struggling and searching for their own prosperity, intensely resented and committed violence against Chinese immigrants for being outsiders and a potential threat to their financial dreams.
In the 1860s the transcontinental railroad was build in part by Chinese men – 15,000 estimated workers, many dying in the process and of course paid less than their white counterparts.
I unfortunately did not find many references to specific Chinese Americans to highlight. A few men who built successful businesses in the west around the turn of the century, and basically no reference to women except for Chinese sex workers sold or kidnapped and brought to America to meet the demand of the growing population of single Chinese men in the U.S.
A vague story of a woman named Ah Yuen (Miss Yuen) or “China Mary” by the white community who seemed to love her but not enough to memorize her real name, is all I could find. We know she entered the U.S. in San Francisco, moved around to a few different western cities and married at least twice and had three children, worked very hard in the food industry and as an entrepreneur, spoke great English and loved to gamble. It’s sad that this is all I can find about one person from that time, compared to the other groups I’ve talked about here. I hope more info is out that that I just haven’t seen or becomes available on immigrants of the time who contributed so much.
https://wams.nyhistory.org/expansions-and-inequalities/westward-expansion/ah-yuen
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/chinese-immigration
https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2021/05/13/asian-american-old-west
Romanticizing the West
Cowboy culture started to die out at the turn of the century as railroads replaced the need to herd cattle across the country and barbed wire was invented so cattle could no longer escape as easily. Native Americans were also coerced and confined to living on reservations by that time. What the west was started to die and the idea of the “Wild West” started to take hold, at least it seems, in the imaginations of the overculture (i.e. white men/people as the drivers of overculture).
But I have no idea what Black cowboys or Native peoples recounting those times would say – would they romanticize it too? The last time Native people were ever free to live on their lands in their chosen ways, even despite the violence and stress that was already happening with settlers and those enforcing “U.S. government” “laws”? If they did, I imagine it would only be romanticized in a relative way. The real time period of romanization would have to be, I’d imagine, before outsiders intending to colonize ever stepped foot here. For Black cowboys, would it be seen as a time of relative “freedom” where they could explore lands they’d never seen and be free of the oppressor’s gaze more often than not? I’d guess if they had the freedom to choose any life they wanted, that’s not exactly the life they would’ve chosen, even if it afforded them some new found level of “freedom”. Most people wouldn’t choose that life. Even free white men. Especially not the ones now who dress like cowboys but have never worked a physical labor job a day in their life lol.
Women, queer folks and immigrants (immigrants as in not white western European settlers because they don’t count, right?) I am certain wouldn’t romanticize that era. For as much danger as there is today being queer, being a person of color, being a woman, there has never been a more safe time period than today, in the most amount of spaces.
As always, it’s important with Neptune to analyze what we romanticize and recognize who the fantasy serves. Were these folks incredibly skilled, tough, bad asses who fully learned what they were made of because they faced hardship? Yes, and we can – and should in my opinion – value drive, tenacity, authenticity and hard work – but does it have to come at the expense of people’s health, safety, rights and prosperity? Hell no.
We have a place here
This writing project is really all to say: even in difficult political environments there is a place for us. A place for anyone who is brave, fiercely loving, and dedicated to making the world a more truly “free” place.
If you’ve read my earlier Neptune in Aries articles, you’ve heard me express my fears around this transit – particularly around brutality and dictatorial attitudes and we are already seeing that under our current administration. Times are scary right now and we don’t know what will happen next. We just do what we can each day to resist the horrors they are trying to create and take back the joy they are trying to destroy.
What is Freedom?
This project – and Neptune in Aries – has made me think a lot about the word “freedom” and what that word means to different people, and the gradual “freedoms” allowed to different groups over time. Relative freedom is not the same as pure freedom even though resentful white people talk down to others as if they are the same thing: “What more do they want now??”
Freedom also doesn’t mean being so “free” that you get to do anything you want at the expense of someone else’s freedom. Freedom is not free from respect and responsibility towards others. Freedom in that way is a myth because we don’t live in this world alone. This unlimited freedom is something we can’t really ever have and in my opinion, why would we want that? Our individual ambitions will always rub up against someone else’s or something else’s ambitions and there comes a limit where we have to compromise on our desires, or recognize the difference between a want and a need – so that a society, a community, and nature can function at an optimal balanced level of abundance, safety, and satisfaction.
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