The final full solar cycle of each year begins when the Sun enters Sagittarius. The mutable fire sign closes out its season (autumn in the Northern Hemisphere and spring in the Southern), as it leads all to the threshold of Solstice. Key features of 2025’s incoming cycle include the heavy presence of planets in water signs, the conclusions of the retrogrades of Mercury, Saturn and Neptune and sign changes for Mercury, Venus and Mars. Forthcoming inner planet connections to Uranus and Neptune at 29° are another signal that impor tant phases are wrapping up.
It all starts on November 21st when the Sun enters the uplifting, optimistic skies of Sagittarius. This is the home of Jupiter, the planet associated with philosophy, ethics and magnificence. Two days later, the Sun will initiate a series of sextiles to Pluto in inventive Aquarius. Venus will repeat this pattern when she ingresses into Sag on November 30th and sextiles Pluto on December 2nd, as will Mercury on December 11th and 13th. Under these alignments, larger ideas and loftier ideals come into play and they inform principled decisions. Other enlightening moments arrive on the 29th, when Venus opposes innovating Uranus, on December 3rd, when a Taurus Moon conjoins the Change-maker, and finally via a Mercury Uranus opposition on December 10th. The 29th is also when Mercury’s retrograde will conclude, at 20° Scorpio 42’.
Mercury’s trip has been meaningful. The Messenger is presently involved in a long series of conjunctions with intrepid Mars, and this retrograde has brought the curious, clever planet back through Scorpio’s waters. Autumn 2025 began with Mars’s entrance into the passionate water sign, an ingress that initiated the formation of the season’s signature event, the grand water trine. Under the Sagittarius Sun, retrograding Mercury in Scorpio will trine Saturn and Jupiter on November 22nd and conjoin Venus on the 24th, and, following its November 29th station, again trine Jupiter on December 6th, Saturn on the 7th and Neptune on the 11th. From instinctual Scorpio, it seems that Mercury has a lot to say before it makes its final trine to Neptune in Pisces in our lifetime, at 29°. On December 16th, the nimble planet, picking up speed, will exit the retrograde shadow of 6° Sagittarius 52′. Saturn and Neptune are also about to undergo consequential changes of direction.
Saturn entered Pisces on March 7, 2023. On November 27th, when the stern, stoic planet turns direct, it will mark the end of its final retrograde in the mutable water sign. On February 13, 2026, Saturn will exit Pisces for almost three decades. Pisces is the last sign of the zodiac, signifying another point of completion. Like Saturn, on December 10th Neptune will also reach the conclusion of its last Pisces retrograde, the entirety of which has been spent at 29°. Imaginative Neptune takes roughly 165 years to travel through all twelves signs. It first entered Pisces on April 4, 2011 and will leave on January 26, 2026. All of this gives more gravity to the messages from Mercury via its connections to Saturn and Neptune and to Venus’s trines to Saturn on November 26th and Neptune on the 30th. The season’s Scorpio centered grand water trine will complete its path of purification, as the days shorten into ever longer nights. Simultaneously, astrology’s Archer is arriving to point the way forward, as it rekindles the flames of hope, faith and inspiration.