Mundane astrology
Uranus notes: what happened when Uranus met Neptune
"Study the past, if you would divine the future." These notes were compiled during the Uranus-Neptune mutual reception of 2003 to 2010, to see what the previous one and the earlier Uranus in Pisces periods had brought. They are kept as a timeline, with the pattern spelled out at the end.
What a mutual reception is
Two planets are in mutual reception when each sits in the sign the other rules. From 2003 to 2010 Uranus was in Pisces, which Neptune rules, while Neptune was in Aquarius, which Uranus rules. Astrologers read the pair as a conversation between invention (Uranus) and imagination, dissolving and the collective dream (Neptune). The last time the same two planets held the same two signs was 1835 to 1844.
1835 to 1844: the previous Uranus-Neptune mutual reception
The decade reads like a list of things we still use. Communication and images arrived first, then the institutions that organise a modern society.
Communication and invention
- Morse demonstrated the telegraph
- Photography appeared in 1839 and was received as a miracle
- The first postage stamp, Britain, 1840; the first advertising agency
- The electrochemical basis of the fuel cell was discovered
- The sewing machine, the hypodermic syringe, the rubber band, the revolving multi-shot firearm
- Mass production of corsets; a machine to make horseshoes
Ideas and institutions
- Darwin's theory of evolution took shape after the Beagle voyage
- The Smithsonian, the London National Gallery, the Royal College of Surgeons
- The international anti-slavery movement and the 1840 London convention
- The first Braille Bible; Noah Webster's spelling book; Dickens's Pickwick Papers
- Queen Victoria crowned at 18; the first Canadian parliament; New Zealand a colony
- Ten-hour working days; the New York police department; free banking in New York
Also in the decade: the Opium Wars, the Texas revolution and the fall of the Alamo, Mount St. Helens erupting, the Millerites proclaiming the end of the world, sunspot research by Schwabe linked to wheat prices, and the births of Mark Twain, Tchaikovsky and Roentgen. Baseball was invented. Tuberculosis was named in print for the first time.
The 1750s: Uranus in Pisces, Neptune in Leo
- Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in a thunderstorm and showed that lightning is electricity (1752).
- Britain and its colonies adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, skipping eleven days. People rioted, convinced the government had stolen part of their lives.
- James Lind, a British naval surgeon, showed that fresh fruit cures scurvy, the beginning of nutritional epidemiology.
- Pope Benedict XIV removed the blanket ban on Copernicus from the Index of Forbidden Books.
- The Acadians were expelled from Nova Scotia; Quebec fell to the British after the Plains of Abraham (1759).
- Porcelain production, an ice-making machine for hospital rooms, Hogarth's Four Stages of Cruelty, a destructive eruption of Vesuvius.
The late 1660s and early 1670s
- 1666: Newton formulated universal gravitation; the Great Fire of London began in Pudding Lane.
- 1667: Connecticut passed America's first divorce law; Milton published Paradise Lost.
- 1669: Etna erupted while Athanasius Kircher designed a machine to clean out volcanoes.
- 1675: the Royal Greenwich Observatory was founded, which is why the Moon tables on this site are in GMT.
- 1670s: Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, explored the Great Lakes region of the New World.
The 1920s
The automobile became a hit, commercial radio and movies with sound made their debut, and the airplane became part of business. Medicine discovered thyroxin, adrenaline and acetylcholine, put insulin to therapeutic use, developed the iron lung, an antitoxin for scarlet fever and inoculation against tuberculosis. Freud made "repression", "sublimation" and "complex" everyday words and Jung's personality types became a parlour game. The first television pictures were transmitted by wire. Agatha Christie wrote her first Poirot novel, Chaplin ruled comedy, mahjong was the game of the decade, and the first Miss America was chosen in 1921.
What the pattern suggests
- Uranus periods bring a new way to transmit. The telegraph and photography in the 1830s, radio and film sound in the 1920s, the networked internet and the smartphone in the 2003 to 2010 reception. Each time the new medium felt like a miracle and then became ordinary within a decade.
- Neptune adds the dissolving of an old order: slavery, the calendar everyone grew up with, a church's reading list, a currency, a border. The mutual reception years carried the 2008 financial dissolution for the same reason.
- Medicine jumps. Scurvy, anaesthesia and the syringe, insulin and vaccines, genomics. Uranus in Pisces (the sign of the body's hidden systems) coincides with the body being understood in a new way.
- The institutions founded in these years last. Museums, observatories, police forces, colleges of surgeons, the postal system. What is built under Uranus-Neptune tends to outlive the people who built it.
None of this is prediction in the fortune-telling sense. It is the method of mundane astrology: find the last time the sky looked like this, read the history, and notice which themes come back dressed in new technology.
Where Uranus was when you were born
Everyone born in a seven-year stretch shares a Uranus sign, which is why it reads as a generation. The house it falls in is yours alone. The full birth chart places Uranus, Neptune and the other eight planets for the moment you were born.
See my full chartThis page is an updated version of research notes published on Astrologically Speaking in 2003. The timelines are from the original; the closing section was added in the rewrite.