Alternative? I know—how Uranian. Predictable…not so much. However, my current experience of this particular type of “unexpected” went counter to what the majority of astrological predictions focus on, especially when a slow-moving planet like Uranus hits a personal planet like my Moon.

In a prior note, I alluded to some of this astro-anxiety which—even as an astrologer—I am susceptible to from time to time. I was anticipating the other shoe to drop at any moment and the big surprise was…it didn’t.

So, I waited and figured that as it stationed retrograde within 0°09’ of my Moon and then went exact a second time that something dramatic would surface and…it didn’t.

Let me contextualize a bit so you can understand why I will argue that Uranus could be potentially viewed as more gradual than sudden, more painstaking than liberating, and more undramatic than disruptive.

In the span of about 6 weeks, I ended up finishing my Jyotish course on an accelerated track, started my PhD the same day I turned in that exam, attended the United Astrology Conference for a week, celebrated my birthday with family in a condensed span of time while welcoming my nephew into the world, moved across the country to the Bay Area, and continued to work and do schoolwork throughout the whole process.

One could argue—umm, that’s a lot of change. And yes, you would be right. However, it was not an abrupt change. It all went surprisingly swimmingly with nothing all that “sudden” or “disruptive”. I had been planning out this period for almost a year.

One caveat: My Moon is in the 6th Placidus / 7th Whole in Gemini. For transparency, one could argue that the work injury I sustained a year prior which gave me the time and focus to apply to graduate programs was Uranian. However, most astrologers would consider a 5 degree orb of an outer planet a little wide and far faster transits also resulting in a work injury, so make of that what you will. I’m looking at the past year so far with a particular emphasis on the last couple months as the orb became tighter.

Prior to even being accepted into my PhD program, I knew that I wanted and needed change in a few different areas of my life but my work direction was one of them. I had been thinking about doing my PhD for years and for a variety of reasons, hadn’t. Many of those reasons had to do with what others had told me including, “You don’t want to do research—that’s boring,” or “The ROI alone on a PhD is a deterrent,” or “You don’t need that when you have the internet.”

The silver lining of the nay-saying is that once I made that choice, I knew it was because it was what I wanted and no one else. I was all in (as I usually am when I make decisions) but this felt different. There was no obligation; only liberation, which, as it turns out, was highly structured.

I made myself a plan which involved 1.5 months of program and scholarship applications and 10 months of getting mentally, psychologically, and spiritually prepared. I’m outlining a bit of what that involved for the purpose of building my “alternative” point about Uranus.

• I started meditating regularly every morning for at least 30 minutes.

• I converted my occasional writing into a full-on discipline that needed strengthening and getting to know my voice better. For 2 hours, every morning, I would research and write, including for this Substack.

• I read and built a separate list of texts for my annotated bibliography for 2 hours, every evening, to get better acquainted with the type of material I saw myself engaging in.

• I enrolled in a year-long Jyotish course to strengthen my understanding of astrology from a more philosophical and non-Western vantage point. I joined Toastmasters in the spring to work on my oral presentation skills and attended every week. And I registered for UAC which I knew might conflict with my school start date and would require advanced preparation to do both.

• In addition to any astrological work, I also worked my online job 6 days a week for 4 hours a day to build a little more space for myself once school started.

• I worked out 1-1.5 hours every day (which is what fuels me mentally).

• I continued to engage in my astrological practice and knowledge building for 1-2 hours daily.

In all, about 12 hours of every day was structured, not including all the life stuff like cooking, laundry, showering, watching my niece and nephew, etc. I had a calendar that I would faithfully mark which stared back at me to keep me accountable. (If you’re wondering where the workhorses are in my chart, Capricorn is intercepted in my 1st house and Saturn is in Scorpio in my 10th Placidus / 12th Whole.)

However, despite all my preparation for this upcoming change, I still thought that Uranus would throw in a wrench as it approached my Moon in Gemini. But that hasn’t happened.

Now, it is absolutely possible that it is too soon to rule out the unexpected. (After all, we have orbs for a reason.) But I thought it would be useful to share that there wasn’t anything out of the blue and there wasn’t anything pointedly disruptive about the first and second passes, which was in fact, unexpected. And that’s where I made a connection to Uranus’ relationship to Saturn and their joint connection to Aquarius.

Aquarius’ traditional ruler is Saturn and the relationship between Saturn and Uranus in Greek myth is quite “revolutionary”. However, it is ironic that the planet we associate with breaking free (Uranus) is represented in myth by Ouranos, a paranoid controlling father who imprisoned his children inside their mother Gaia (i.e. in Tartarus, aka Hell). It took the planet and mythological character we associate with constraint—Saturn (aka Cronos)—to break his siblings free and overthrow his controlling father as the supreme ruler. Sounds backwards right?

This is one of many reasons why Richard Tarnas has pointed out a better fit of matching Uranus to Prometheus. The planet’s discovery was also shocking in that it was the planet that shattered the belief that Saturn was the boundary of the known universe. Connecting the “heavens beyond” or the eternal realm of the gods to the known terrestrial realm is arguably a Promethean story.

However, there is a push-pull dynamic between Uranus and Saturn in this discovery story that I would argue, sits on both sides of this equation.

I don’t find it a coincidence that when Sir William Herschel discovered Uranus and wanted to name it after King George III of England that other international astronomers collectively rebelled against using the king’s name. So King George III was metaphorically de-throned and a Greek character was chosen instead—so that it wouldn’t stand out from the other planets and would fall in line with the Greek family tree(i.e. with Ouranos the father of Cronos (Saturn), who is the father of Zeus (Jupiter), who is the father of Ares (Mars) and Hermes (Mercury)). Ouranos was also kind-of the father of Aphrodite (Venus) but that is another matter pertaining to castration and sea foam.

But that planetary naming process was painstaking. It took 70 years to reach a group consensus. Talk about fixed mindsets (Aquarius). Imagine not receiving your name—a key part of one’s identity—until you were 70 years old! (I can think of another modern mythological character who was referred to as “He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named” and he was a tyrant too.)

The point is—Uranus is tied to both tradition and breaking free from it, to individuality and to collective identity, to monarchy and democracy.

After Ouranos was dethroned, the paradigm of the Greek theocracy changed. Kind of. There would now be multiple gods and goddesses who ruled their own divisions…until one (Cronos) became paranoid and controlling and decided he himself would swallow his children instead of making their mother do it.

The way in which Cronos broke free from his father prompted a prophecy which became a family curse, or a family pattern, wherein he himself would suffer the same fate. And indeed, with the help of his mother and grandmother, Zeus (Jupiter) faced his father Cronos to overthrow him and save his siblings, except this time the chosen bodily fluid involved was vomit instead of semen. So, slightly different.

But in that process, Zeus too received a prophecy that he too would be overthrown by his son, just like his father and grandfather. So what did he do? This time Zeus got really smart and instead of making the mother swallow her children or swallowing his children himself, he swallowed his wife Metis while she was still pregnant. That oughta do it.

But this is where the generational curse took a turn.

In swallowing Metis—which means wisdom—Zeus internalized wisdom. Metis continued to exist from inside Zeus but grew to counsel him about what ruling means. Acting as an internal compass, she helped him navigate multiple coups and transformed him from an impulsive, domineering ruler (like his father and grandfather) to a ruler with at least a somewhat more tempered nature. Ultimately, Metis’ wise counsel would ensure that Zeus’ rule would not end the way it had for his predecessors. She helped break the cycle.

The Uranus and Saturn symbolism carries the push-pull of the generational curse, the urge to break free from it, failing to do so, and repeating the pattern. When the lesson wasn’t learned, a traumatic and abrupt coup d’etat would occur without actual change and the cycle would start again. However, once wisdom was internalized, the cycle was broken (which connects Jupiter appropriately to wisdom or higher learning, keeping in mind it stems from his own “metanoia”).

When it comes to work and career, my own metanoia came after a series of experiences of sudden breaks. These breaks were thankfully different from the Grecian coups but they still offered me opportunities to make lasting change, particularly to how and why I would choose work. But I chose again and again the familiar cycle of work and career as forever connected to drudgery because as said by Bruce Hornsby and the Range, “that’s just the way it is.”

I imagine most kids who grow up on farms are acquainted at a very young age with what “hard work really is”. I also acknowledge that finding work that one enjoys is a first world privilege. That said, this cycle has been connected to a number of other issues, so I knew changing this at a root level would ripple.

That root change included connecting to my own inner guidance system instead of everyone else’s and it was a long, painstaking process that required shedding familial beliefs. The result was the self-imposed 12-hour “work” day I described because I wanted to, because I loved it, because…it was no longer hard work.

Returning now to Uranus, I’d like to offer a few reflections on this myth, the discovery of Uranus, and my own experience (so far) of a major Uranian transit which for all intents and purposes has shifted my understanding of Uranus’ connection to change. When it comes to breaking cycles:

• Repressing or stuffing down the thing that we’re most afraid of (like Ouranos, Cronos, and Zeus swallowing their children) usually leads to that thing coming back out in precisely the way we don’t want. We think we find the solution by “doing things differently” when it’s only swallowing it down a different way.

• Uranus can represent abrupt opportunities that attempt to shake us from our pattern (i.e. overthrowing the father figure). However, the real change comes from the continual choice made after the shake-up.

• It’s easy to see the drastic action or sudden insight as the solution that “breaks our chains” and solves the problem. It is not. For both the international astrologers that named Uranus and multiple generations of Greek siblings in the pantheon, collectively rebelling against the king wasn’t the thing in and of itself that brought freedom. It took the gradual integration of wisdom to achieve that.

• Thus, individuation (Uranus) is not a sudden, one-off lightning bolt. It has a relationship with time (Cronos / Saturn).

• Said from another perspective, the process of unlearning generational or familial lessons takes time. (After all, Uranus is considered a generational planet.) Internalizing wisdom may even take 70 years to overcome fixed mindsets and to individuate into one’s own identity apart from the family—and yet still be born out of it and therefore, tied to it (but not defined by it).

• Uranus does not represent a magic escape route. Super Mario may find a secret backdoor that offers the opportunity to ‘level up’ but if you die, you go back to the beginning of that level. The pattern is not escaped from. It is transformed and “revolutionized” in a hard-won way. Anyone who knows a little bit of history knows that revolutions take time (and sadly, usually a lot of bodily fluids). It may begin with a shot or a decree but the process is often painstaking to work out.

I’m suggesting that the reward of this Uranian integration—and a potent Uranian transit—is, in fact, not undergoing another lap around the merry-go-round. It is a different experience from all the prior cycles experienced. It is going beyond the bounds of one’s known universe.

The takeaway for me is to not equate Uranus with abrupt, lightning bolt change. There could be a sudden choice point, but the decision alone to suddenly and finally overthrow one’s family patterns isn’t what breaks the family pattern. In fact, that can just play into the cycle. Instead, the change Uranus offers is slow, integrative, and hard-won.

Those are all things that we usually associate with Saturn. But this change is to see things from a new perspective, to illuminate the wisdom from within, and to change an entire internal operating system. All of those things have a relationship to time and effort.

Change can be slow and Saturn helps sustain amidst that. But methodical effort can be no more than drudgery without the iterative work of inner revisioning towards a new identity. I hardly declare myself having “figured it out.” I do feel centered and secure though about the changes I have made over the past year enough so that when the choice points that might’ve led to a sudden break came across my path, I skated past them. They felt less significant because the wisdom was more integrated. So perhaps those moments could be seen as mini-revolutions of identity development along the path to a different paradigm.

I would argue that these two Aquarian archetypes—Saturn and Uranus—have a relationship that speaks to one another across the boundary of known traditions and patterns and what could be.

A Uranian transit feels less about a coup d’etat and more like the petitioning of citizens for signatures to vote differently. It takes time. (Ugh.) It takes repeated intention. (Groan.) It takes consensus. (Sigh.) But it brings something quite unexpectedly un-dramatic but also entirely revolutionary when it arrives: sustainable change.

Cover Image: Photo by Layne Lawson on Unsplash