During the past couple of years I’ve often found myself in conversations where someone would say “I can’t wait for things to go back to normal.” to which I always had to respond “But they won’t.” And it’s not just my zealous know-it-all attitude (I said, not JUST).

The truth is, the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020 had the astrological circles biting their nails. Is it a war, is it a plague, will it be both? It was pretty soon obvious which, but the problem was what came after didn’t look too peachy. Unless the peach we’re talking about changes its taste with each bite.

One of astrology’s complexities is that it does repeat certain patterns, but not in the same sequence. Out of all the entities in a chart, the only one travelling with regularity is the Sun, with the rest moving at different speeds. Just like an orchestra, they create a song out of the same notes played out in a different order, in a symphony that does not exactly repeat itself for roughly 4,320,000 years. Imagine how boring it would be if it would.

The further they are from the Sun, the slower the planetary transits through the signs, so everything past Saturn which itself takes 3 years per transit, is considered a generational influence. Which brings us to Uranus.

Uranus is funnily named, but now for the reason you’d think. At its discovery in 1781, Sir William Herschel wanted to name it King George after the monarch, which the French wouldn’t have, so it was called Herschel for a while, after which astronomers decided on Uranus, like the mythological sky god, the father of Time. Why would that be funny? While all the planets are named after gods, the first 7 are named after the Roman version of the Greek pantheon, where Chronos is named Saturn or Aphrodite is named Venus. So to follow the sequence, Uranus should be named Caelus. But Uranus does not care for conforming one bit.

In astrology, Uranus is known as a disrupting principle, as rebellion, as sudden insight, as electrifying-on-the-spot gnosis. It has been connected to technology, particularly one that uses electricity, but if we were to summarize it in one word it is breakthrough.

If you are familiar with mythology now you’re thinking that doesn’t sound like Uranus at all. Because it’s not, and the simple reason is that at the time the celestial bodies were given their names, humanity’s cosmological frame of reference was much more interconnected and astronomy still considered astrology a friend. In modern times, that hasn’t been the case since Kepler.

However, another congruent Uranian archetype is the trickster. In Prometheus the Awakener, Richard Tarnas makes the compelling argument that the mythological character best fitting the nature of this planet is Prometheus, the figure who stole fire from the gods and brought it down to Earth, making mankind more powerful than they’d ever been.
Just like the ability to think really fast, technology is also a tool of progress and development, reason for which Uranus has been tightly connected with Aquarius. But that’s territory for another day.

Uranus transits take about 7 year per sign, with a total zodiacal cycle of about 84 years. Each time Uranus enters a sign, we will see unexpected change there, for better or for worse. It has been in Taurus since 2018, and as well all know, Taurus is concerned with food. But not only food, Taurus is all things basic (not in the pumpkin spiced latte way, but in the sustenance bottom of the pyramid way). Taurus is fixed earth, which means it is all things of a foundational material value, all resources, and things which make us feel good. Taurus is food, Taurus is money, Taurus is clothing, Taurus is property. Taurus is the stock market. Taurus is connected to gas and any sort of fuel, because we need those to get anything else.

So what could we possible get when we add the most disruptive of the planets in the most solid of the signs? Well, the same thing we got between the years of 1934 and 1942, when Uranus was last going through this sign. Does that sound worrying? The transits prior to that were 1850-1857 and 1767-1774, all dates which we were seeing major change in the spheres just mentioned. But wait, there’s more…

What neither of these dates were seeing, was Uranus together with the North Node. Rather than a placement, the North Node is a mathematical point calculated from the meeting of the orbit of the Earth with that of the Moon. In other words, it is what determines the eclipse season, which changes signs about every year and a half. The North Node and its counterpart the South Node have in Vedic astrology the names of Rahu and Ketu – the head and the tail of the dragon, and not the nice kind either. While Ketu – the tail – slaps and stings (so technically a wyvern, thank you) weakening things, Rahu – the head – bites and poisons, but it poisons with performance enhancing supplements strengthening whatever it touches.

The Nodes have joined the Taurus-Scorpio axis on the 19th of January 2022, and they will be crawling through until 19th of July 2023. Slowly inching towards Uranus, now the head is very close to being on the same degree of Taurus. Transits are not something that happen from one split second to the other, transits have a build-up. But as soon as 2 points are within a sign, is as if they are flatmates whose relationship develops until they share a bed.

So to reformulate, what do we get when we add disruption on steroids to the most solid of the signs? Well, they say mankind is only 9 meals away from anarchy and with Mars having just joined Taurus a few days ago adding some fire to the already spicy mix, the tone has already been set by the Sri Lankans for some very rebellious upcoming notes.

The good part? It doesn’t last forever. And despite Uranus being a disruptor that is hard to deal with on the spot, we have to agree that progress always comes with a cost.