Uranus: the planet of interruption

Uranus is the first planet that was not known all along. Anyone can see the seven classical celestial bodies without instruments; Uranus, at a brightness of around sixth magnitude, lies at the very edge of what a dark sky will give up. It can be seen, but only by someone who knows where to look — and even then it stays a faint star among many. That is exactly how it was recorded for a long time: John Flamsteed entered it in his catalogue as a star in 1690.

Discovered in 1781, and taken at first for a comet

On 13 March 1781 William Herschel, from his garden in Bath, turned a home-built reflecting telescope on an unremarkable point of light — and saw no pinprick of a star but a tiny disc that shifted along from night to night. He reported a comet. Only the orbit calculations of other astronomers showed that the object was moving on an almost circular path far beyond Saturn — a planet, then. Herschel named it after his king, George III; the name in use today, proposed by Johann Elert Bode, came into general use everywhere only in the course of the nineteenth century.

A spinning top on its side

• One orbit of the Sun takes around 84 years. Spread over twelve signs, that leaves Uranus about seven years in each.
• Its axis of rotation is tilted by about 98 degrees. It rolls along its orbit, so to speak, instead of spinning upright — each pole lies in sunlight for more than forty years and then just as long in the dark.
• In a telescope it appears blue-green. The methane in its atmosphere swallows the red part of the light.
• It is accompanied by five large moons — Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon — by a swarm of smaller ones and by a narrow ring system that was not discovered until 1977. The two largest moons Herschel found himself; the names come from Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.
• It has had a visit exactly once: Voyager 2 flew past in January 1986.

What it stands for in interpretation

Modern astrology assigns Uranus to Aquarius and reads it as the principle of interruption: the unexpected, the sudden insight, the urge to break away from something. Where Saturn holds and limits, Uranus breaks off. None of that is meant romantically — an interruption can liberate and it can ruin, and the chart does not say which of the two. That the discovery fell in the years between American independence and the French Revolution is what later gave this vocabulary its pathos.

That the attribution is recent belongs to the matter: classical astrology gets by with seven planets and has provided neither rulership nor office for an eighth. Anyone who works with Uranus is working with an addition, not with a tradition — as set out under the planets.

Why its sign counts for less than your age

Seven years in a sign means this: “Uranus in Scorpio” describes no person but an age bracket — people who started school in the same year. For a statement that means you, the birth position of this planet is therefore the weakest part of the picture.

With Uranus the other direction yields more: not where it stood at your birth, but what angle it makes to that point today. Because its orbit runs so evenly, this reaches everyone at roughly the same age.

• Around twenty-one, a quarter of the way further on, it stands at a right angle to its birth position — the time when many push something through for the first time against what their background expected.
• Around forty-two the half orbit is complete, and it stands opposite its starting point. That is the passage commonly called the midlife crisis.
• Around sixty-three, a right angle once again — and at about eighty-four it has come full circle.

How plainly such a passage turns out depends on what it touches in the birth chart: whether Uranus stands there close to the Sun, the Moon or one of the angles, which hang on the time of birth and hence on the ascendant. And the year figures are a calendar, not a forecast. They say when the theme comes knocking, not what will come of it.