Aries ♈︎

First of the Twelve. For two thousand years astronomers have called the point where the sun crosses into spring “the first point of Aries” — the zero-degree of every chart ever drawn. This is the record of the sign that opens the wheel.

The figure begins in Babylon, where the spring stars were recorded in the MUL.APIN catalogues as LÚ.ḪUN.GÁ, “the Hired Man” — the agrarian labourer who appears when the fields demand him. When the scribes of the fifth century BC divided the sun’s road into twelve equal signs, his place at the head of the year was already old.

Greece gave the stars their ram: Chrysomallos, the winged ram of the golden fleece, who carried Phrixus across the strait and was set in the sky for it. The fleece itself — nailed in a grove at Colchis under a sleepless serpent — became the object of the first great quest in Western literature, the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts.

The sign’s authority outlived its myth. The vernal equinox — the origin point of celestial longitude — is still called the First Point of Aries in working astronomy and navigation. The record carries the oldest meaning in the calendar: initiative, first light, the year’s opening move. One canonical asset now holds that identity, native on Solana with its official representation on Base.