Uranus facing Pluto: rupture and transformation stand face to face.
Rupture confronts mutation: a historical moment when the forces of change oppose each other.
For the study of old charts, a marker of tensions between forces of change.
Attributing to an aspect that has vanished from current charts a role in one’s own life.
By Thomas Guilhot · updated
Sixty to seventy years separate each meeting of Uranus and Pluto from their face-off.
The latter last happened in 1901–1902, with Uranus in Sagittarius and Pluto in Gemini, at the height of the rise of electricity, the automobile, and the first theories of modern physics. Those born then would be over one hundred twenty: the aspect has vanished from the charts of living people. The next face-off will come in the second half of the 21st century, and will concern the grandchildren of today’s children.
Its interest is mostly historical: astrological biographies of scientists or artists of the early century, founding charts of parties or companies, horoscopes of nations. In them, it would suggest a confrontation between two forces of change: the sudden rupture attributed to Uranus, and the slow, deep mutation attributed to Pluto. Richard Tarnas linked this period to the great scientific discoveries, those of Planck and Einstein, and to the social tensions that preceded the First World War.
No chart calculated today by Versana will contain it. In an old chart, it is read through the two areas it sets against each other and through the personal planets involved, as with any generational aspect. Finally, it serves to illustrate the rhythm of the full cycle, irregular because of Pluto’s very elongated orbit.
No couple today is concerned.
In charts of the past where it joined Venus or the Moon, it was read as a tension between a thirst for freedom and the intensity of attachments, at a time when arranged marriages were starting to recede. A comparison of charts could only bring it up between a living person and a great-grandparent, an exercise in family curiosity more than a couple’s reading.
Astrologers who study the biographies of the Belle Époque link this opposition to a time of major inventions and industrial upheaval: electrification, the telephone, the nascent assembly line, the first great social conflicts.
In a figure of that era whose personal planet it touched, one would speak of a path made of ruptures and reinventions. No career today is concerned, and this reading is valid only as historical illumination.
No present-day daily life is concerned.
To grasp the sensitivity attributed to it, just picture a street in 1901: electric streetlights beside gas lamps, the first automobiles among the horse-drawn cabs, a telephone in a few well-off homes, strikes and demonstrations in working-class neighborhoods. An era of rapid transformation, split between enthusiasm and worry, which specialists in cycles associate with this face-off.
The ancient treatises knew nothing of these two planets; all commentaries on this opposition come later, since Pluto was only discovered in 1930.
Richard Tarnas integrated it into his study of the cycle of these two planets, which he associates with the great periods of historical and cultural transformation. André Barbault mentions it in his tables of the cycles of the 20th century. These are after-the-fact reconstructions, which Versana presents as avenues of interpretation, not as facts.
Today, it mostly helps in understanding the whole cycle and in reading charts of the past, without saying anything about anyone’s character.
Tradition calls it dynamic: the two functions are said to pull against each other and call for an adjustment, without foretelling anything.
Transpersonal planet. Modern planet, discovered in 1781 (William Herschel).
The profile of UranusCounted between 172° and 188° apart.
The oppositionTranspersonal planet. Discovered in 1930 (Clyde Tombaugh); a dwarf planet for the IAU since 2006, kept by astrology.
The profile of PlutoNo, practically not: the last opposition dates from 1901–1902, and children born during those two years would be over one hundred twenty. We will have to wait for the second half of the 21st century to see it again. A chart calculated for a living person will not show it.
It lets you study old charts and place each stage of the relationship between these two planets. The other aspects of this cycle, the conjunction of the 1960s, the sextile of the late 1990s, or the square of 2012–2015, concern living generations and have their own page on Versana.
It sets two forces of change face to face: the sudden rupture of Uranus and the deep mutation of Pluto. Those who study the great cycles see in it the echo of the fractures that led to 1914. These readings are only interpretations, and Versana points out that a historical coincidence proves nothing.