AI Rendition
You may have recently read, perhaps even on this blog, that every time Uranus has transited the sign of Gemini since the country's founding in the 1770s, the United States has been involved in a major war. Uranus's orbital period lasts about 84 years, so if you start with Uranus's ingress into Gemini in 1774, and add 84 years incrementally, you get the years 1858, 1942, and 2026[1]Footnote 1: Ingress Precession. Given Uranus's seven year transit through each sign, that means that Uranus was in Gemini during the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II, and is now moving into Gemini again as we see a frightening rise in authoritarianism throughout the world, and in the U.S. in particular.
Uranus actually entered Gemini earlier this year, in June of 2025, ahead of the 84 year period. Similarly, it entered Gemini in August 1941, rather than 1942. The reason for these time variances has to do with a wobble in the Earth's orbital motion that causes the zodiac to shift slightly over long periods of time. After 84 years, Uranus reaches the same point in space, but by that time the zodiac has shifted backwards just over one degree, which causes a slightly earlier ingress.
Note that this does not mean we are definitely headed for armed conflict. There are encouraging astrological indications of a different kind of collective response this time around. But what does Uranus's reappearance in Gemini mean for us as a harbinger of war? To further explore the question, I want to take a deeper look at the Civil War, the conditions and major players that drove it, and the parallels and divergences between the planetary outlook of then versus now. It's a broad, deep, and rich topic, worthy of a two-part article.
Part 1: The Inexorable Struggle Towards Freedom
When Uranus entered Gemini in June of 1858, the lead up to war was all but inevitable. The so-called "tragic prelude" to the Civil War known as Bleeding Kansas was in full swing, with pro-slavery border ruffians and abolitionist free-staters murdering each other in the Kansas territory over whether Kansas would be admitted as a free state or a slave state (spoiler, Kansas was admitted as a free state in 1861, just before war officially broke out).
Tragic Prelude, by John Steuart Curry, 1942
The tall figure is John Brown, a staunch abolitionist who led antislavery forces to fight in Kansas. He later became infamous for leading a raid at Harper's Ferry with the intent to incite a slave revolt, which resulted in his execution. Born during a Scorpio Full Moon with Mars conjoined Pluto, Brown was a man of intense conviction, willing to die (and lose three of his sons) in the fight to end slavery.
The violence had reached its peak by 1856-1857, when Uranus was transiting the last degrees of Taurus at a highly conflictual alignment to the Moon of the U.S. natal chart. Even the federal army was called in to quell the violence, although, somewhat ironically, on the side of the pro-slavery camp, given President Franklin Pierce's allegiance to the Southern states. Then, in 1857, just as Uranus reached exact square to the U.S. Moon, an economic panic swept the nation.
The chaos of the time sowed feelings of uncertainty, dread, and fear that further divided an already polarized people (sound familiar?), making diplomatic solutions impossible, and driving an increasing sense of moral clarity over what needed to be done. The corrupt institutions of slavery and their brazen attacks against democracy and shilling of social Darwinism (again, sound familiar?) made it clear that anyone of moral conscience must take a stand against the entrenched elite minority that explicitly sought to control everyone else (the déjà vu is stifling!).
Whatever other motivations may have been at play, it became clear with the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863[2]Footnote 2: Radical Documents that slavery was the central theme of the war. The country could not remain united, nor could it remain a democracy, if slavery was not abolished[3]Footnote 3: Northern Motivations.
The Emancipation Proclamation was just one of many examples of radical social doctrines disseminated during transits of Uranus through Gemini. Other examples include the Declaration of Independence from 1776, the Gettysburg Address from 1863, and the UN Declaration on Human Rights from 1948. Going back to the Uranus in Gemini transit of the 1690s, we have Locke's Second Treatise of Government, where he argues against slavery and for the right of the citizens of a country to enact political revolution (see below). The correlation is astrologically low-hanging fruit: Gemini is associated with ideas and documents, and Uranus with radical, emancipatory ideals.
...whenever the Legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People...Whensoever therefore the Legislative shall transgress this fundamental Rule of Society; and either by Ambition, Fear, Folly or Corruption, endeavor to grasp...an Absolute Power over the Lives, Liberties, and Estates of the People; By this breach of Trust they forfeit the Power the People had put into their hands, for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the People, who have a Right to resume their original Liberty.
— Section 222, John Locke
Not that we want to glorify the North too much. Consciously or not, its interests became tied to the industrialists that sought to corral a major influx of poor immigrants into massive leviathan factories, where they would be effectively paid slave wages while risking life and limb through exhausting work schedules. The "robber baron" captains of industry would soon rule the country after the destruction of the Southern slave economy, repeating many of the same social-Darwinist themes with the same corrupt ambitions as the recently defeated enslavers. It would take the hammer of Theodore Roosevelt in the early 1900s to take on and bust the industrialists' power, when Uranus reached a revolutionary opposition to Pluto to usher in the Progressive Era, an alignment we will see again in the early 2040s.
It should be clear to us why Uranus is a key astrological symbol for the Civil War, and for the United States in general. Two of the primary keywords associated with Uranus are rebellion and emancipation. These two words fit both the Revolutionary War and the Civil War to a tee, even if for very different reasons. The Civil War itself began with Uranus at a conflictual square to Saturn, suggesting a battle between the rebellious (or chaotic) freedom-seeking of Uranus and the established (or tyrannical) order of Saturn.
But we cannot simply say that the side of rebellion and emancipation was at war with the side of establishment and control. Astrological symbolism works on a principle of interpenetration, where the themes being reflected are complexly interwound with each other and within the forms expressing them. For example, the South was in rebellion against the establishment Union; but the Union became the more radical side by demanding an end to slavery. The Union wanted to maintain the status quo (Saturn) of the United States while abolishing (Uranus) one of its traditional institutions. Meanwhile, as the North advocated for the emancipation of slaves, the Southern enslavers wanted emancipation from the Union, so they could be free to continue the established tyranny of the slave trade.
More deeply than all that, the stress between Saturn and Uranus reflects the inherent challenges humanity has struggled with for centuries to define what it actually means to be free. It is too simple to say that freedom is merely the ability to do and say whatever we please, based on whatever whims move us. Such a limited view of freedom inevitably devolves into barbarism, leading to enslavement of mind and body to the lower urges of the human animal. True freedom is hard-won through challenge, compromise, and sacrifice; it is an ever-evolving process that cannot be pinned down to a single, static definition. Ultimately, if you are not free, then I am not free, and we must stay humble and vigilant in the effort to nurture freedom for all, if we want freedom for ourselves.
That the struggle for freedom is a keenly Saturn-Uranus themed effort makes it unsurprising that these two planets are so intimately connected to the Civil War. Indeed, the war ended and the slaves were freed as Saturn and Uranus entered a harmonious trine alignment in 1865, just after the Saturn Return and the Uranus Return of the United States. In other words, Saturn and Uranus were not only in conflict at the start of the war and in harmony at the end of the war, but by the end they were near the exact same position they were at when the country was founded in 1776.
The struggle for freedom is also strongly stamped on the natal horoscope of the United States. Of primary importance is the horoscope's Moon in Aquarius, the sign ruled by both Saturn and Uranus. The Moon represents the consciousness of the people and the values that arise out of their collective sense of security and common identity. What defines America's collective values and social mission better than the crusade for freedom?
An exemplar of the combined spirit of Uranus in Gemini and Neptune in Aries, Frederick Douglass became famous for his fiery orations on the urgency of emancipation for Black slaves.
Beyond Uranus, there was an important Neptune transit occurring at the very start of the Civil War. Just two days after the attack on Fort Sumter, Neptune entered the sign of Aries, symbolizing a clearing of the fog that gave moral clarity against the weak, dreary, and hopeless effort to diplomatically deal with the enslavers. No longer was abolition a crazy fringe dream, it was suddenly a possible reality, though at a great and bloody cost. Neptune, the planet of sacrifice to a higher good, had met Aries, the sacrificial ram and a sign ruled by Mars, the god of war.
The threat of "dissolution" of the union, a phrase often uttered by both sides of the war, evokes Neptune's dissolving nature. Neptune's deeper emphasis on unification through compassion and moral purpose came through with Aries's fiery zeal in the speeches of Frederick Douglass, the sermons of Henry Ward Beecher, the songs of Julia Ward Howe, and the subversive courage and spiritual valor of Harriet Tubman.
Taken altogether, such astonishing astrological synchronicity is not uncommon at profound historical inflection points like the 1860s. In fact, we are in similarly profound astrological territory today, as the country and the world reel from a new inflection point whose outcome is still very uncertain: Uranus has just entered Gemini, and Neptune has just entered Aries. But, 2025 is not 1860 — we have grown up a little since then, and the overall planetary picture is promisingly different. Part 2 of this article will explore these differences and where we may be headed.
Leave a Reply