Almagest

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Uranus opposition Uranus

the transiting Uranus's arrival, at the halfway point of its cycle around age forty two, in opposition to its own natal place, or one person's Uranus opposite another's in synastry

What the tradition reads

A natal chart cannot show Uranus in opposition to itself, since a single body cannot stand at an angle from its own degree; the tradition instead reads this key through transit, at the halfway point of Uranus's own roughly eighty four year circuit, around age forty two. Wikipedia's account of planetary returns calls this Uranus half return the origin, for many people, of what is popularly called the midlife crisis, a stressful but also energizing period in which permanent, successful relationships can be unsettled by casual flirtation and in which many feel the pull to break out of a routine they have been stuck in for years; Cafe Astrology's own transit reading describes the same period as a set of crossroads in career, life path or general direction, a time of finding one's own inner spark. Between two charts, an opposition from one person's Uranus to another's sets the two placements at opposite ends of one axis; because Uranus moves so slowly, a synastry opposition of this kind asks the partners to be roughly half the planet's own cycle apart in age, so that one person's need for freedom and change stands, quite literally, a generation across from the other's.

The story

An opposition sets two points diametrically apart, a hundred and eighty degrees, half the circle; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs calls it, together with the square, discordant, and Wikipedia's own summary credits the medieval astrologer Ibn Ezra with calling the opposition the most powerful aspect, relational rather than blending as a conjunction does, its dichotomous quality often read as tense, though like any axis its two ends can be read as complementary as easily as oppositional. Uranus meeting Uranus has no myth of doubling to draw on, since Uranus does not face himself in the surviving stories; the tradition reads the pairing instead through Uranus's own single story of primordial rule and sudden overthrow. Gaia bore him to cover her on every side, and together they produced the Titans, the Cyclopes and the Hundred-Handers, whom Uranus hated and hid away inside the earth; angered, Gaia armed Cronus, the only one of her children willing, with a sickle of adamant, and Cronus castrated Uranus and ended his reign in a single stroke. Uranus reaching the far side of its own circuit at the halfway point is read through the same abrupt, overturning character that story gives Uranus's own fall, a rupture arriving all at once rather than by degrees.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Uranus:Uranus:opposition.