Uranus in Taurus - The Irresistible Force Meets the Immovable Object

by Sue Tompkins

After a roughly seven-year sojourn in Aries, Uranus goes into Taurus on May 15, 2018, retrograding back into Aries on November 6, 2018. Then it re-enters Taurus on March 6, 2019 for another seven-year journey that ends on April 26, 2026 (with a preview of Uranus in Gemini from July 7 to November 8, 2025).

Whatever events and changes Uranus in Taurus might bring, many of them will have been set in motion some time ago. Birth and death start a long time before they arrive, and planetary ingresses are no different. These ingresses can be fun to watch; I particularly like seeing the headlines and the films that emerge in the week surrounding an ingress. For instance, the week that Jupiter went into Scorpio saw the launch of the film Happy Death Day!

Uranus and Taurus are an interesting combination to attempt to fathom. Taurus — the sign that, out of the entire zodiac, is the most resistant to change — meets the planet that insists upon it. Uranus challenges the status quo and forces both the individual and society to change and, in particular, to break with the past. From the purely Uranian point of view, clinging to the past can only hinder progress. From the deliberate, enduring, and persistent Taurean viewpoint, change not only might topple the much-beloved quiet life, it also threatens the most important thing of all: security. Both the planet and the sign are coming from different places, but both share a refusal to budge from their entrenched positions.

Even before Uranus’s ingress into Taurus, this refusal to budge has been in evidence in various guises around the globe for some time. For instance, there is the stand-off between the United Kingdom and the other member states of the European Union. At the time of writing this (in late 2017), the negotiations between Britain and the EU over “Brexit” are moving at a snail's pace. Each side refuses to give. Uranus is approaching the UK’s (Placidus) 8th-house cusp, which is very fitting for the economic divorce that the UK has initiated with the EU.1

Ultimately, wherever there is a standoff, movement eventually has to happen, and with Uranus in Taurus, when change does happen, it may do so in the most drastic and far-reaching kind of way.

Of course, one can never know exactly what a given transit will bring, whether to an individual or to a nation or to the globe itself. Who could have predicted that one manifestation of Uranus in Aries would be selfies?!

Building and Land Use

Table: Previous Uranus Transits in Taurus

June 6, 1934 – May 15, 1942

July 8, 1850 – March 14, 1859

May 3, 1767 – April 8, 1775

May 21, 1683 – April 28, 1691

June 12, 1599 – May 15, 1607

The last time Uranus was in Taurus roughly coincided with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s tenure in office as the 16th president of the United States, from March 1933 to April 1945. (See Table) Uranus in Aries had seen the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the beginning of the Great Depression (at its worst in the early 1930s as Uranus in Aries was squaring Pluto in Cancer). When Roosevelt came to power, he enacted the New Deal, a series of reforms and programs in response to the Depression. From the point of view of Uranus in Taurus, this included the regulation of the banking system and massive building works. Banking is a Leonine activity, but there is no doubt that money, values, and the resources we earn and spend come under the Taurean umbrella. Under Roosevelt’s New Deal, the unemployed were paid to build schools, bridges, roads, dams, and power plants. The Empire State building, the Chrysler building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Rockefeller Centre were all built as part of relief programs.

In some countries, this current ingress will almost definitely result in the building of major infrastructure, as well as in the increased construction of new homes. Perhaps this time, in terms of house-building, there could be a rise in the construction of prefabricated homes, which are bought in kit form. Common in some countries, notably Sweden, “flat-pack” housing would be revolutionary in others. Flat-pack homes are said to be eco-friendly, quick and easy to build, and substantially cheaper than conventional buildings. People could, in true Uranus in Taurus style, build their own homes independently, without having to hire builders.

The last ingress saw, amongst many other things, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936), Japan’s invasion of China (1937), the Winter war between the Soviet Union and Finland (1939), and much activity from Nazi Germany, with finally the outbreak of World War II in 1939. From a Uranus in Taurus point of view, many of these happenings changed borders; land ownership changed hands. The way in which land was used also changed in several European countries. For instance, in the UK, there was a Dig For Victory campaign, and citizens were urged to cultivate every spare inch of land. People were independently growing their own food, and gardening became part of the curriculum in virtually all schools.

In the U.S., Roosevelt introduced legislation that sought to help farmers. The droughts, bad farming practises, and the resultant dust storms affecting millions of acres of land forced thousands of families to abandon their farms. By 1940, 2.5 million people had fled the Great Plains.2 The Taurean issue of land use was on the political agenda, as was the truth about how farming was practised and the true cost of that. Perhaps the current transit will awaken and change farming practises, too. As the world population increases, the question of how land should be used — for food, housing, recreation, conservation — is already the subject of much debate.

Farming and Food

Taurus embraces bulls (obviously!), but also cattle and other farm animals such as pigs, as well as farming, gardening, the earth, the land, and all matters having to do with food production. All these life areas could be subject to the revolutionary changes that only Uranus can bring. One area that I expect to radically shift is the manner in which cows are milked.

In the UK, just 5% of dairy farmers use robotic milking, a trend that was discussed on the UK TV programme Countryfile. In the Netherlands, 30% of milking is done this way. According to the American-based company Lely, just 2% of U.S. dairy farmers use it.3 With robotic milking, cows can milk themselves when they want. No human has to be involved — instead, a cow recognition system is employed, driven by modern technology. A robot scans the cow’s identification tag on her ear. Gates close around her. Based on the information gleaned from her tag, the milking machine knows the shape of her body and the shape of her udders. Lasers facilitate the movement of four tubes to find her teats. The system monitors the quality of her milk and the amount of it released. It can also monitor her health and tell whether she is in heat or pregnant.

In true Uranus in Taurus style, the cow becomes independent, and in a way, the farmer does, too, as she or he no longer has to be available twice a day at prescribed hours to do the milking. Cows are apparently producing better-quality milk with a higher yield. Some cows are milking themselves three or four times daily, whenever they feel like it, not when decided by a human. The system drastically reduces labour costs and, for this reason, is bound to become more popular. So, I predict a huge rise in interest in this process.

No doubt there will be other revolutions occurring in the realms of food production and in what and how we eat and cook. Some people will eschew meat and dairy altogether. Veganism is hugely on the increase in some countries, prompted by celebrities announcing this as their lifestyle choice. The trend is being driven by perceived health benefits as well as welfare issues. One suspects that any great move towards veganism in the West will be short-lived, but Uranus in Taurus could certainly bring about people being awakened to the truth of what goes on in the meat and dairy industries, which in itself will prompt changes to occur in farms, abattoirs, and supermarkets. Vegan or not, perhaps people could wake up to the reality of where their food comes from.

Eating is certainly a Taurean preoccupation. Perhaps the transit will herald better treatment or prevention of various eating disorders, such as anorexia, or at least a new awareness of how serious a condition it is. Of course, in the West, our major problem with eating is what we eat and how much of it we eat. It would be nice to think that Uranus in Taurus might decrease obesity, but it is difficult to imagine how this could happen. Uranus always awakens us to the truth; perhaps the realities of being hugely overweight, including the economic cost to the state as well as the health ramifications for the individual, may put the subject higher on the political agenda.

During the last ingress of Uranus into Taurus in the 1930s–‘40s, economic deprivation and the nonexistence of “fast food” ensured that people in most countries tended to be skinny. Whatever impact the current transit may have on people’s body mass, a move towards greater body awareness is possible. However, given the Uranian tendency towards extremism, new bizarre ways of looking at and treating the body are also more than possible, and any awakening of understanding about eating disorders may only arise out of an even greater urgency for this to happen.

Finance and Banking

Considering that Taurus is associated with bullion and with security — security in the shape of food on the table and money in the bank — what can we expect with Uranus in that sign? My suspicion is that there may be greater awareness of how the monetary world, as it currently works, doesn’t deliver to people the freedom that they would like it to. One can never be free if hugely in debt. In truth, money does mean freedom for those who have it, and varying degrees of enslavement for those for whom it is in short supply.

Uranus in Taurus might well deliver all sorts of changes to various economic systems, but perhaps more interesting — and easier to speculate upon — will be the changes in how we use our resources; how we use, make, and spend our money and what we spend it on. With Uranus, we know to expect more technology in the making and spending of money. We may be routinely making purchases, large and small, with a mobile phone. This happens now, of course, and more so in some regions of the world (e.g., parts of Asia) than in others. This is probably set to become more mainstream.

More revolutionary is the notion of FingoPay technology for people who want to ditch their bank cards and pay with their finger.4 Scanners build a 3-D map of your finger veins and turn that data into an encrypted template that can be linked to your bank card. Apparently, vein patterns are very difficult to copy or steal. This or various types of personal micro-chipping or the applications of barcodes on the skin may be the future for many. Uranus in Taurus could take some of us further into a cashless economy. A cashless society might not be all good news, though, as one obvious feature of cash is that it can be used by all — young or old, rich or poor.

Internet virtual banking in the shape of bitcoins has been around for a few years, but given that cryptocurrencies are independent of banks and goverments and that all currency is transferred on a peer-to-peer basis, cryptocurrencies are sure to be in the news in a big way during the transit of Uranus in Taurus. For good or ill, these controversial currencies put an individual’s wealth entirely in their own hands. There is no middleman to take a slice of any profit. At the time of writing this, bitcoins cannot be seized or frozen or even audited. Obviously, unregulated money is a real threat to government control, taxation, policing, and so on. One wonders about the risks of Ponzi schemes, too, as some people running unregulated online exchanges that trade cash for bitcoins will be incompetent or downright dishonest. Of course, the same applies to those handling “real” money; still, with bitcoins there is no insurance coverage for users, and every transaction is final. Personally, I don’t know enough about this area of money or its implications, but I suspect that, by the end of this Uranus transit, we will all know a lot more.

Whatever Uranus in Taurus might mean in monetary terms, it is clear this won’t be the same for everybody, because the situation is so different amongst different countries and between people in those countries. For example, according to the World Bank, nearly half of all adults in the world — about 2.5 billion people — don’t have a bank account.5 Whilst the vast majority of these people live in developing or emerging economies, this is not exclusively the case. In the U.S., the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation estimates that about 7% of households (9 million) do not have a bank account, and a further 20% are “under-banked,” meaning that they hold a bank account but do not have full access to banking services.

In some countries, women are not allowed to have their own bank account. According to UNICEF, about 230 million children under the age of five around the world have not been formally registered in the country of their birth and, therefore, do not officially exist. These people are not going to be entering a cashless society anytime soon, but some kind of financial revolution could still be in the cards for many of them.

Major changes, if not actual revolutions, in banking are doubtless to be expected, but the form these changes will take will surely vary hugely around the globe, depending on the financial services currently in existence. In the West, bank branches have been closing in vast numbers since 2008 onwards, with the financial crises. In the U.S. alone, more than 10,000 branches have closed. Whilst this has made access to a bank difficult for many people, younger customers, in particular, seem happy to switch to online and mobile banking. Some countries, such as Brazil, have promoted “branchless banking,” so banking is still possible but takes place in shops or post offices. Perhaps this is the kind of revolution that Uranus and Taurus could bring in response to the closure of so many banks.

If Uranus in Taurus does give rise to individuals feeling that they are trapped by debt and that money is not offering them the freedom they would like, this could create tremendous growth in so-called sharing economies, or what some people call “collaborative consumerism” — the idea being that individuals can rent out their car, their bike, their apartment, their computer, almost anything, when they are not using it. Airbnb is one example already well established, but I suspect that many more are to follow. The Chinese government has invested huge political Will in the notion of the sharing economy and expects something in excess of 10% of their economy to be of this nature within a decade. One example of how this works in China is the approximately 16 million bicycles available for rent; in the major cities like Beijing, an individual rents a bicycle for a very small fee, an idea that has been exported to cities around the world.

Converging Themes

In the UK, money and animals are coming together in the form of new banknotes. The £5 and £10 note are already in circulation. A release date has not been given for the £20 note, but it will appear sometime after the ingress of Uranus into Taurus. The notes are made of polymer and, in true Taurean style, are arguably aesthetically pleasing; they are lovely to handle, and the £20 note will have the artist J.M.W. Turner on the front. However, these notes contain 0.05% animal fat and have been deemed unacceptable by various groups, including some vegetarians, Hindus, Sikhs, and others. The Bank of England argues that polymer banknotes are much harder to counterfeit and last longer than paper notes. The controversy continues — both sides have locked horns, and neither is budging.

I associate the Taurus–Scorpio polarity with the police: Scorpio, of course, with detectives, but Taurus with the bulk of the police force — what Brits (and Americans) often rather rudely call “pigs.” Police truncheons used to be called “copper sticks,” and the job of the police was to keep the peace and to protect one’s property, all very reminiscent of both Venus and Taurus. I think that we can expect major changes in police forces in the years to come: for instance, the combining of police departments from neighbouring areas to save money, or moving vast numbers of police officers away from what they are doing now and into dealing with cyber-crime.

Will the items we spend our money on change with the transit? Perhaps we will be more inclined to spend money on art, which might also be perceived as a good place for investors to put their cash. The almost inevitable growth of the digital marketplace will doubtless continue to revolutionize our shopping habits. Department stores are already taking steps to make shopping more of an “experience,” in a bid to make their shops go-to destinations.

Before the ingress of Uranus into Taurus is well and truly upon us, we might consider how we can personally use the transit. Taking truthful stock of our finances might be one idea. For some of us, the transit could prompt an awakening of practical skills. Doing things for ourselves rather than paying someone else to do them. Discovering a genre of music that is new to us. Taking up gardening, even if it is just growing a pot of herbs. Above all, watching the effects the transit has on us all.

References and Notes:
(All URLs were accessed in February 2022.)
1. I’m referring to the UK “Union” chart: January 1, 1801; 12:00 a.m. LMT; Westminster, England (51°N30^, 00°W07^); source: Nicholas Campion, The Book of World Horoscopes, The Wessex Astrologer Ltd, 2004, Chart 357.
2. http://great-depression-facts.com/
3. http://www.lely.com/solutions/milking/
4. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/20/british-supermarket-offers-payment-fingerprint-worldwide-first/
5. http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2012/04/19/three-quarters-of-the-worlds-poor-are-unbanked

Images:
Astrological glyphs: Image by Peter Lomas from Pixabay
Highland cattle: Image by Michaela Wenzler from Pixabay
Cryptocurrencies: Image by WorldSpectrum from Pixabay
Police: Image by BodyWorn by Utility from Pixabay

First published in: The Mountain Astrologer, Apr/May 2018.

Author:
Sue Tompkins is a registered homeopath and one of the most experienced astrologers in the UK. She lectures widely at home and abroad. Her books, Aspects in Astrology and The Contemporary Astrologer’s Handbook, are international bestsellers. In a recent survey conducted by the Astrological Association (GB), where 130+ professional astrologers around the globe were asked to list their ten favourite astrology books, Aspects in Astrology came first! A fellow of the Faculty of Astrological Studies, she has been honoured with various awards, including, in 2003, the Astrological Association’s Charles Harvey Award for exceptional service to astrology. Website: http://www.suetompkins.com

© 2018/22 - Sue Tompkins

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