The chart of the Spring Equinox — cast for the moment the Sun enters the sign of Aries — is arguably the most important of the four Cardinal ingress charts. Many astrologers believe it sets the tone for the entire year, not just the following quarter. It happens at the same moment (not the same clock time) everywhere, so the house positions of the planets are different, depending on the location. Casting the ingress chart for the capital of a country is considered predictive for the whole country for the following quarter regarding the politics, events, attitudes and general zeitgeist. You can analyze the chart for a particular location, and/or analyze it in reference to another chart. Here is the Aries ingress (Spring Equinox) chart cast for Washington, DC, and here is a bi-wheel of that chart around the chart of the USA (Sibley) if you want to follow along with my analysis.
If you follow this blog, you know that one of the major current transits is the ongoing square of Uranus to Pluto, and that aspect is, of course, a major player in this chart — not exact, but still within less than four degrees of orb. (*Note: in the original version of this post, I said the aspect was exact again in June. This is a good example of why we elderly types should not rely on our memories. :-) It's exact again May 20th.) As I mentioned in my discussion of the Winter Solstice chart, Uranus rules electricity, Pluto rules breakdowns and extremes of all kinds, and there were many, many problems with the electric grid over the last few months in different parts of the country, almost all of them due to a series of severe winter storms, as well as a great deal of public discussion around fracking, a very Plutonian process that provides fuel for the electric grid. In the Spring Equinox chart, Mars joins the fray, strong in its own sign, tightly conjunct Uranus (and more widely, the Sun) square the Moon, and, of course, square Pluto. The three planets in Aries cluster around the IC (4th house cusp) of the USA’s chart, and in the first house of the equinox chart.
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