Uranus

Meaning

Uranus is the first planet to have been discovered rather than known since antiquity: at the very edge of naked-eye visibility, it was found with a telescope in 1781. It takes about 84 years to go round the zodiac, roughly seven years in each sign, and is retrograde for about five months a year. Its axis is tipped over by some 98°, so it rolls along its orbit on its side.

Astrologers read it as independence, originality and sudden change: the urge to break with what is expected, to invent and to wake up, and the restlessness that comes when life grows too predictable. It describes where someone needs freedom, and where change tends to arrive without warning.

Because it stays years in a sign, its sign describes a generation; its house and its aspects to the personal planets and the angles make it personal. Modern astrologers make it the ruler of Aquarius beside Saturn, the sign’s traditional ruler. Tradition, which never knew it, gives it no dignity.

Its gifts are inventiveness, candour, a feeling for the future and the courage to be different. Its difficulties are rebellion for its own sake, a certain coldness, and change made too abruptly to take root.

In practice

• Over a lifetime Uranus squares its birth place around 21, opposes it around 40, a transit often tied to midlife change, and returns around 84.
• Its house shows where life insists on freedom: in the 11th, groups and causes; in the 4th, an unusual home or many moves.
• On an angle or close to the Sun or Moon, it often marks someone who needs to do things their own way.
• Its transits stay within orb for a year or two and are read as breaks with routine and sudden openings.

Across traditions

• Traditional astrology, Western, Indian and Chinese, worked with the planets the eye can see, and has no place for Uranus.
• Chinese now calls it 天王星 Tiānwángxīng, the Sky King star, a translation of its Western name.
• Human Design counts it among its thirteen bodies: Uranus is the unusual, its gate showing where someone is different.

Origin and history

William Herschel found it on 13 March 1781 from his garden in Bath and first reported it as a comet. He proposed to call it Georgium Sidus, after King George III, and Jérôme Lalande suggested Herschel; the name Uranus, the Greek sky god and father of Kronos, was put forward by Johann Elert Bode in 1782 and became universal by 1850. It had been seen before and catalogued as a star, by John Flamsteed in 1690 among others. The element uranium, identified in 1789, was named after it. Astrologers took it into their charts in the nineteenth century and by the early twentieth most gave it Aquarius; Richard Tarnas has argued that its character fits Prometheus better than the sky god.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune takes Uranus from the Swiss Ephemeris (DE441): its apparent position seen from the centre of the Earth, in the tropical zodiac. It is marked retrograde when its daily motion runs backwards and stationary within about seven days of a station.

Ulune’s dignity tables keep to the seven traditional planets, so Uranus has no score; with Aquarius rising, Ulune names it as the modern chart ruler beside Saturn. Within 8° of the Sun it is marked combust, as every planet is in Ulune, although tradition, which knew only the visible planets, never spoke of it so. The calendar dates its stations, sign changes and exact transits, with the whole span each transit stays within a degree.