Uranus at a right angle to Neptune: the spirit of rupture and the collective dream work against each other.
Dream and rupture collide: a generation seeks to reconcile freedom and ideal.
A capacity to question inherited ideals and look for new ones.
Swinging between disillusion and revolt, without finding a stable form for their aspirations.
By Thomas Guilhot · updated
About forty years after each conjunction, the two planets cross at a right angle.
The last square, a waning one, formed in the early 1950s, between Uranus in Cancer and Neptune in Libra, with many exact contacts between 1952 and 1955. It concerns a large share of the baby boom children, who grew up during the postwar boom years known in France as the Trente Glorieuses, between new prosperity and memories of war, before carrying the protest of the late 1960s. The next square, a waxing one, is expected around the late 2030s.
This aspect tells the story of a generation first. In an individual, it only weighs if it meets a personal point. It would then set the need to break with family heritage, evoked by Cancer, against the search for an ideal of harmony and justice, associated with Libra. This tension pushes people to challenge inherited values, to dream of a fairer society, and sometimes to run up against their own contradictions. Many baby boomers saw the ideals of their youth erode, then come back in other forms.
The difficulty would be swinging between disillusion and revolt: rejecting old ideals without managing to build new ones. For a person in whom this square is relayed, a concrete commitment, a creation, or passing things on to grandchildren give this energy a lasting form, and let them gauge what the struggles of their youth truly changed.
The generation of the early 1950s lived through great upheavals in customs: sexual freedom, contraception, separations that became easier, couples chosen outside family conventions.
When the square touches an intimate planet, the person may waver between romantic ideal and a need for independence. Between partners of the same age, it is common and does not characterize their relationship. It only counts when it touches the chart of a much younger partner.
This generation often had careers shaped by great technical and social changes: mechanization, computerization, deindustrialization.
When the square is relayed in a chart, the person looks to reconcile idealistic commitment with a need for rupture, sometimes at the cost of late career changes. Passing their experience on to younger people, as a mentor, trainer, or volunteer, often gives this path a new meaning.
Songs of their youth, memories of demonstrations, community involvement, a late spiritual search: this square often permeates a generation’s memories.
If it reaches an intimate point, it invites them to sacrifice neither freedom nor ideal. Grandchildren, travel, and local commitments often offer these people a ground on which to reconcile the two, far from the great causes of their youth but with the same fervor.
Absent from the ancient treatises, this square was commented on in the 20th century as a generational marker.
It is read as a tension between the principle of rupture and the principle of ideal, favorable to crises of values and collective questioning. André Barbault readily linked these phases of the cycle to moments of ideological doubt. These readings, often built after the fact from history, remain interpretations. Humanistic astrologers read in it instead a generation’s effort to invent new forms of solidarity.
Modern astrologers see in it the climate of an era, which only becomes personal in contact with the intimate planets.
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 83° and 97° apart.
The squareTranspersonal planet. Modern planet, observed in 1846 (Johann Galle, from calculations by Urbain Le Verrier).
The profile of NeptuneThe spirit of rupture and the collective ideal collide in it: questioning of inherited values, a search for new ideals, a possible wavering between disillusion and revolt. Common to children of the early 1950s, it only takes on intimate weight by touching a personal planet.
The last formed in the early 1950s, between Uranus in Cancer and Neptune in Libra. The next, a waxing one this time, is expected around the late 2030s or early 2040s. Each passage stretches over several years, with many exact contacts.
Between people born in the same decade, it is common and sheds no light. To weigh in between two charts, it would have to reach an intimate point in a person born twenty or thirty years later. One would then read a bond that confronts two different relationships to the ideal.