2025

With all the major planets, Jupiter, Rahu-(Ketu), and Saturn changing sidereal signs in 2025, the year shapes up to be more changeable and upside-down even than 2024. Throw in Venus and Mars retrogrades, a Rahu-Saturn conjunction in Pisces, and Jupiter moving briefly into exaltation at the end of the year – changing signs twice - a mixture of easy and stressful makes it hard to see where we come out.

The following is the briefest overview of the year, with the headline events:

Mercury retrogrades this year are in Water signs, with the final retro arc dipping back into airy Libra. The middle period in Cancer from July to August is the longest and slowest, which tends to be the most difficult in terms of communication breakdown. Remember these phases have their upside, where you rediscover information and have a second bite at the cherry.

Mercury Retrograde in Pisces: March 15th to April 7th 2025,

Mercury Retrograde in Cancer: July 18th to August 11th

Mercury Retrograde in Scorpio: November 9th to November 29th

Venus Retrograde in Pisces from March 2nd to April 13th is the classic six-week phase that goes back eight years altogether, with five Earth-Venus conjunctions or ‘kisses’ that occur approximately every eighteen months. Venus is retrograde less often than any other planet, and this current period in its exaltation sign promises to put an extra vitamin in your relationships. Venus in Pisces allows you to make peace, to believe in somebody in a transforming way, and rescue a relationship that you thought doomed. From March 14th to 20th, and May 8th to 12th, Venus is also in Libra navamsha, which gives even more romantic and diplomatic power, but in a more measured and balanced way. Venus retro in general brings out another side of someone close to you, where you have to work harder at relating. It can also raise issues around creativity, the arts, and matters of cost and/versus value.

Jupiter begins 2025 in Taurus, retrograde up to February 4th, which feels slow and thorough. The opportunities that sped by in the second half of 2024 are grounded in and it pays now to ground everything slowly. In Cancer navamsha from March 19th to April 10th, especially you get good value for your donation and generosity. Jupiter then moves into Gemini from May 14th (Wednesday), where it remains altogether up to June 1st 2026. June 13th to 28th is a good period for learning and connection with Jupiterian knowledge, and July 28th to August 13th rewards you for your faith and belief.

There’s a small dip into Cancer from October 18th to December 5th, where you get a flavour of Jupiter’s exaltation power in both sign and navamsha, before it retrogrades on November 9th up to March 11th 2026. This short window sees Jupiter at full potential power.

Rahu and Ketu enter the Aquarius-Leo axis from May 18th 2025 up to December 2026, where Rahu its own sign was last from November 2006 to May 2008. This means mainly that eclipses this year will fall in and around the Pisces-Virgo and Aquarius-Leo axes:

Total Lunar Eclipse March 14, 2025, Friday – Leo /U.Phalguni

Partial Solar Eclipse March 29, 2025, Saturday – Pisces /U.Bhadrapada

Total Lunar Eclipse September 7, 2025, Sunday – Aquarius /Purva Bhadrapada

Partial Solar Eclipse September 21, 2025, Sunday – Virgo/ U.Phalguni

Eclipses’ effects last far beyond their given day and are pivotal moments, especially when they closely hit a planet in your chart – allow a tight orb of influence. Every issue is exaggerated and even though you may know you are making too much fuss, the situation feels real enough at the time. All eclipses are good for meditation and spiritual work, where you get many times your value for your effort.

With Rahu and Saturn effectively swapping signs from Aquarius to Pisces and vice-versa, Kalsarp Yoga, where all the planets are between Rahu and Ketu, also forms a number of times in 2025:

Kalsarpa Yoga April 25th – May 7th 2025

Kalsarpa Yoga May 22nd – June 4th 2025

Kalsarpa Yoga June 18th – July 1st 2025

Kalsarpa Yoga July 15th – July 23rd 2025

Saturn enters Pisces with a fanfare on March 29th, where the Solar Eclipse of this day makes it even harder to ignore. Six classical planets sitting in that sign, plus from a Western standpoint, Neptune and Chiron, make one of the historic periods whose influence may only be clear after the fact. I’d like to think this conjunction will bring out the best of Pisces spirituality, belief, and collective consciousness-raising, and form an antidote to the materialistic Capricorn Grand Conjunction of 2020. There has to be a re-adjustment, and precisely at the point when darkness threatens to overcome, it also consumes itself.

(Incidentally, there was a similar line-up to the infamous Great Conjunction of 1524, when six planets gathered in tropical Pisces. Contemporary astrologers in Europe issued pamphlets advising the noblemen and women to run to the hills to escape the coming deluge. This Great Flood never happened, perhaps because those planets were all in sidereal Aquarius and any natural disaster was more likely airborne – not that there should necessarily be a disaster at all. Maybe something wonderful will happen.)

The Rahu-Saturn conjunction from March 29th to May 18th, makes one of the diciest periods of 2025, focusing on rough, real world issues that might get extremely ugly. Mass, endemic child abuse in politics and high society has come again to the fore in the UK, and the lid could be taken off the whole matter with the new US administration and long-promised release of the Epstein and Diddy files. If at all, this will likely only confirm what many people have thought and alleged for years, and it’s hoped will be more than a superficial exercise. After the ongoing exposé of abuses within the Catholic Church, the Church of England is now also implicated, with the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby leaving his post formally on January 6th. Pisces is a symbol of the Christian Church, and the Archbishop admitted to the "long-maintained conspiracy of silence about the heinous abuses", and the "the historic safeguarding failures of the Church".