Uranus

What Uranus represents

Uranus is the impulse that sets a person free: sudden intuition, inventiveness, revolt against whatever stifles. Wherever it falls in a chart, the person needs space, originality and the freedom to change course. Its gift is clear sight and the courage to leave the beaten track. Its excess is instability, a refusal of any constraint, an independence that keeps others at arm’s length or breaks things off just when commitment is called for.

Uranus was the first planet discovered by telescope, by William Herschel in 1781. Its discovery coincided with an age of political and technical revolutions, which fed its symbolism of rupture and novelty. Modern astrology made it the ruler of Aquarius, a fixed air sign, where it meets a taste for ideas, the future and the collective, while Saturn keeps its place as the sign’s traditional ruler. There is no agreed exaltation or fall for Uranus, and its meaning is still being refined.

Its rhythm in the sky

Uranus takes about eighty-four years to travel the zodiac and stays around seven years in a sign. It is a slow planet, known as generational: everyone born within the same span of about seven years shares its sign. That sign therefore describes less an individual trait than the way a generation questions, invents and seeks its freedom, in step with the changes of its time.

For about five months of every year, Uranus is retrograde, appearing to move backwards along the zodiac, which is why around two people in five are born with it in that phase. In a chart, then, neither its sign nor its retrograde motion is what marks a person out. What does is the house it occupies, the area of life where freedom matters most, and the close contacts it makes with the personal planets or with an angle, revealing how far that need shapes the character.

Uranus and freedom in love

When Uranus is prominent in a birth chart, close to the Sun, the Moon, Venus or an angle, the person needs air in relationships: a bond in which each keeps their own share of life, friendships and plans. Such people often grow attached through surprise and the thrill of discovery. They may also experience commitment as a threat, blow hot and cold, or break away when they feel hemmed in, sometimes before they have even said what they were missing.

Comparing two charts, Uranus counts above all where it lands on the other person’s Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars or angles. Such a contact can spark love at first sight, a fascination, the feeling of being woken up by the other, and also an instability that asks both of them to stay flexible. Its sign, by contrast, is the same for nearly everyone of a given generation, often in almost the same part of the zodiac, and so says little about one couple in particular.

To go further

• Liz Greene, The Outer Planets and Their Cycles (1983)
• Howard Sasportas, The Gods of Change (1989)