The year 2012 in the sky: Uranus square Pluto

More has been written about the year 2012 than about most of the years before it. The date that was passed around at the time came out of an old Central American calendar count, not out of astrology. Something did stand in the sky in 2012 all the same, something astrologers had had in their calendars for years — not a date, though, but a stretch of time.

Uranus in Aries, Pluto in Capricorn

Pluto moved into Capricorn in 2008 and Uranus into Aries in 2010; both slipped back into the previous sign once more, and Uranus settled in Aries for good only from March 2011. From 2012 onwards the two formed an angle of 90 degrees, the square, which interpretation counts as an angle of tension. Both travel slowly: Uranus needs around 84 years for its circuit, Pluto around 248. An angle between them therefore does not dissolve in a matter of weeks; it holds for years.

Meetings of this kind are rare. Uranus and Pluto last met on the same degree in the mid-1960s; a good hundred years separate two such meetings, with considerable variation, because Pluto's orbit is strongly eccentric. The square of 2012 was the first phase of tension after that meeting.

Why the same angle becomes exact seven times

Between June 2012 and March 2015 the square became exact seven times. That is down not to the planets but to our vantage point. Seen from the Earth, the outer planets appear to run backwards for a few months of the year, because the Earth overtakes them on its faster orbit. Uranus and Pluto both do this, each at its own times, and so the exact angle is overshot, undershot again, and reached once more.

For interpretation that means there was no date, but nearly three years in which the same configuration was brought into focus again and again. Anyone who turned that into a single day in December had substituted a date for a stretch of time.

What was read from it

In interpretation Uranus stands for interruption, for sudden change and for technology. Pluto stands for power, for what lies beneath the surface, and for rebuilding from the ground up. The square between the two was read accordingly: power relations in motion, institutions under pressure, leaps in technology.

What is wrong with sentences like these is not that they are false. It is their breadth. Take any three-year span since 1900 and hold it up against them: somewhere power relations shifted, somewhere an institution came under pressure, somewhere technology made a leap. A sentence that fits every span says nothing about the one it was written for.

Cycle and event

This is where a difference can be pinned down that gets blurred constantly in this field. A cycle marks out a span, and interpretation lays a theme over it. What happens within that span, who decides what, which contract is signed, is nowhere in it — that comes from people. Between “something is up for negotiation in these years” and “something happens on this day” there is no difference of degree, but an altogether different claim.

Why a global configuration says nothing about you

The square stood in the sky for the whole of humanity at the same time. The only thing that differed was where it landed in an individual birth chart: which houses the two planets were running through at the time, and whether they touched a point of that chart along the way. For one person the square fell on empty degrees, for another exactly on her Sun. This is where the collective and the personal part company, and that is why no global configuration serves as information about a single life. What the celestial bodies mean one by one is set out under Planets.

What happened next

The configuration is long past, and the two planets have moved on. Uranus moved into Taurus in 2018, went back into Aries once more, and stayed in Taurus from March 2019. Pluto reached Aquarius in 2023, returned to Capricorn twice, and has stood there for good since November 2024. The clock of this field keeps running, then, whether or not what was announced has come about. How such stretches of time are reckoned at all is set out under Astrology.