Aspect

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Uranus Square Neptune

Shared by a generation, this square sets the impulse to overturn against the impulse to surrender, and it becomes a personal problem only in the house it occupies or where a personal planet joins it.

Uranus and Neptune stood at right angles through the early and middle 1950s, Uranus in Cancer against Neptune in Libra, and everyone born across those years holds the aspect. The friction is between a function that wants to break the existing arrangement and one that wants to melt into it. Neither can be served by the other's method. On the scale of a generation that produces a cohort at odds with itself about whether to storm the institutions or drift away from them, which is a matter for historians. For a single reader it is a question of location.

In one life the square shows wherever the two houses involved meet. A native with it across the fourth and seventh will find home and marriage repeatedly caught between rupture and retreat: the sudden departure, the vague reconciliation, neither quite decided. Across the second and fifth, money and pleasure alternate between reckless reinvention and passive drift. The pattern is not constant, which is what distinguishes a square from a temperament. It arrives in episodes, usually when an outer transit or progression touches one end and the whole configuration lights up.

A personal planet on either end makes it a lifelong argument rather than an occasional one. Mars there gives action that is by turns rash and evasive, with a marked reluctance to declare intentions. Mercury gives a mind that can neither settle nor properly abandon a position. The productive form, when it appears, is a person who can hold an idea in its unfinished state for years and then act on it abruptly and correctly. The unproductive form is a life of dramatic gestures followed by long, unexplained withdrawals.

What It Gives

  • ◆ideas held in unfinished states
  • ◆sudden action after long patience
  • ◆resistance to inherited arrangements
  • ◆sympathy for those who drift

What It Costs

  • ◆rupture alternating with retreat
  • ◆intentions left undeclared
  • ◆withdrawals nobody can explain

This is one line of a whole chart. The rest of it — every placement, house and aspect at once — is a birth date away.

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Uranus Conjunct Neptune

Everyone born in the early 1990s carries this conjunction, which fuses the impulse to break form with the impulse to dissolve it, and which speaks about an individual only through house and personal contact.

Uranus Sextile Neptune

A generational sextile, held by everyone born across several years, that offers cooperation between invention and imagination and is claimed by only the small minority whose personal planets reach it.

Uranus Trine Neptune

A whole generation shares this easy flow between invention and imagination, which is exactly why it goes unnoticed: what every contemporary also possesses is never experienced as a talent.

Uranus Opposite Neptune

Held by everyone born in the opening decade of the twentieth century, this opposition faces revolt against dissolution, and reaches the individual as a lifelong argument conducted through other people.

Sun Square Moon

A first or last quarter birth divides intent from instinct, so the native's wants argue with their needs, and the argument, though tiring, does most of the work of building a character.

Sun Square Mercury

Ninety degrees cannot open between the Sun and Mercury; the planet's greatest elongation is about twenty-eight degrees, so the square belongs to aspect tables and software errors rather than to any nativity.