WRITINGS & ARCHIVES ON ASTROLOGY

My trigger-happy colleagues can have the Promethean look at Uranus in Pisces and start buying water filters; but in true Aquarian style, I prefer the retrograde view. After all, what good is having a past if you don’t revisit it on just such an astrological occasion, and maybe even learn from it? 

On the last go-round, Uranus entered Pisces on (get this!) April 1st, 1919, and wove in and out of Aquarius for the second half of that year, until finally He re-entered Pisces on January 22, 1920, just in time for the Roaring Twenties, and stayed there until (get this, again!) April 1st, 1927. Talk about one helluva April Fools’ Day! He returned to the last degree of Pisces for a final station at the end of ’27 and lasting just into early 1928, fleeing the coop just in time for the Great Depression. Of course, we’re going to see revolutions of all sorts when examining any historical period, but during this span, it’s the revolutions via the sign of Pisces that should be noteworthy about Uranus’ dynamics. And indeed, astrology works!

Two weeks into this new era and the headlines read, “Stars Form Own Company, United Artists….Four film pioneers have claimed their stake in celluloid. Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks have founded a film company…which will produce, release and distribute their own new motion pictures.” This was truly the start of independent film-making.

The initial degrees of Uranus in Pisces represented the start of Prohibition, which went into effect on January 16, 1920. (In an ironic reversal, by His final station in 1928 the House Judiciary Committee decided Prohibition was responsible for the increase in crime and insanity in the United States).

Bear in mind Pisces rules more than movies, music and drink. Pisces is the sign of slaves, waifs and nomadic people; and Uranus, as the Great Awakener, symbolizes liberation and contradictions.

These first degrees of Uranus of Pisces also saw such social trends as the rise of Fascism (which was founded by Mussolini on March 23, 1919), the advocating of an anti-Semitic policy by a then little known leader of the German Workers’ Party, Adolph Hitler (February 24, 1920), and the formation of the Communist Party by MaoTse-tung in China in early 1922.

As Uranus proceeded through Pisces, the Ku Klux Klan was also on the rise in the United States as indicated by this headline on August 8, 1925, “40,000 Klansmen March on US Capitol.” Ironically, just as powerful was the up and coming presence of blacks in the music industry with the likes of Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, Bessie Smith and Josephine Baker. And on that final station of Uranus in Pisces in late 1927, Duke Ellington broke records at the Cotton Club.

With Uranus in full swing in Pisces, the Jazz Age was well underway as seen in the publication of “The Great Gatsby,” Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and the popularization of Dadaism with the quotation, “Art is dead. This is the new machine art. 

The rise of women and their hemlines also took place during this era. American women won the right to vote on August 26, 1920. Lady Astor was the first woman in Parliament on November 28, 1919. Miriam “Ma” Ferguson became the first woman governor in the US (of Texas, believe it or not!). Joan of Arc was canonized by the Catholic Church on May 30, 1920, just 489 years after she burned at the stake. Aimee Semple McPherson opened her Temple in Los Angeles, proclaiming “Jesus is coming soon – get ready!” Greta Garbo made her film debut with a great sensation. And the St. Louis Court of Domestic Relations attributed the increase in local divorces to the growing economic independence of women.

In science and technology, Uranus made His impact too. Days before His initial entry into Pisces, a professor of physics at Clark University published a monograph, indicating a trip to the moon would someday be possible. In the first weeks of Uranus in Pisces, the headline was, “Hydroplane Crosses Atlantic.” A crude version of television was invented and NBC hooked up all 48 states to a giant radio “studio.” Ironically, the John Scopes was found guilty in the “Monkey Trial” (and at the time of this writing, great controversy is taking place over the cloning of human being).

Astrologers might be interested to know that it was a solar eclipse which facilitated the complete verification of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity in late 1919 (and that landmark work, by the way, is being questioned in the science community, as reported by the New York Times in January ’03). Finally, while in His last degrees of Pisces, Lindburgh fiew the Atlantic alone, and Al Jolson made the first talkie, “The Jazz Singer.

Film devotees would agree nowhere else was Uranus in Pisces so evident as in the advances of motion pictures. It began with United Artists, ended with the talkies, and in between we saw “Potemkin,” the merger of the Mayer and Goldwyn studios to create MGM, Abel Glance’s “Napoleon,” the phenomenon of Valentino, and in the last year of Uranus in Pisces, Cecil