Uranus, the Sibly Uranus return, Project 2025 & the specter of political violence today

 

 

“And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”—Kevin Roberts, President, Heritage Foundation

 

Kevin Roberts made this statement in the context of a longer interview this past July 2^nd on Real America’s Voice’s War Room, identified by Wikipedia as:

“… a right-wing to far-right streaming, cable and satellite television channel founded in 2020 and owned by Robert J. Sigg. The network and online presences have promoted right-wing and far-right conspiracy theories, including COVID-19 misinformation, 2020 election conspiracies, and QAnon.”

So, Roberts was preaching to the choir on Real America, but that makes his statement—which marked the Supreme Court’s recent decision rendering American presidents effectively “above the law” for crimes committed while in office—no less chilling at this incredibly tense political moment. 

 

Kevin Roberts, president of the extreme right-wing Heritage Foundation

Roberts also helped create the extreme theocratic and patently autocratic Project 2025 that is poised to become our national political agenda should Trump regain the presidency in November. If you haven’t already read the document or read about it, at least, the entire Project 2025 document is available here, and a summarized version of it is available here.

As Roberts’ interview made clear, the Project’s authors and supporters make no apologies for the radical nature of their proposals, which they have framed as a “Second American revolution” they intend to win. In other words, it’s a battle plan—complete with implicit violent threats—which contradicts the somewhat innocuous sounding intro their website gives to the document:

“This book is an invitation for you the reader—Mr. Smith, Mrs. Smith, and Ms. Smith—to come to Washington or support those who can.  Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.”

In a nutshell, once they’ve dismantled and undermined the operations of the federal government, the plan promises to bend what’s left of that government to the will of extreme right-wing conservative policies and an aligned, authoritarian Executive. 

 

Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo

 

Interestingly, this is not the first time Trump has attempted to transform our entire system of checks and balances into a theocratic autocracy tailored to his preferences. Heather Cox Richardson also documents a 2020 State Department “report” written under Trump’s then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that took a stab at a similar project—the following description is a bit long, but it raises important details for this discussion:

“In mid-July 2020, under the guise of supporting human rights, a report from the State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights reworked American history into a vision of white Christian nationalism that looked much like the worldview of the southern enslavers before the Civil War. The report, written under evangelical secretary of state Mike Pompeo, began by stating that the primary tradition ‘that formed the American spirit’ was ‘Protestant Christianity . . . infused with the beautiful Biblical teachings that every human being is imbued with dignity and bears responsibilities toward fellow human beings, beings, because each is made in the image of God.’ It claimed that the Founders established the United States to secure property rights and religious liberty and that the Constitution imposed strict limits on the government in order to protect that liberty.

In the 1850s, southern enslavers used a similar argument to try to take over the United States government, keep it from doing anything but protect property, and throw the power in the country to the states, where a minority could enforce its will unchecked by a popular majority. The stunted version of history embraced by Trump and his allies translated this old ideology into an authoritarian argument for the future. It erased the victory of democracy in the Civil War, the ongoing struggle for equal rights that followed and that lasted until the 1970s, and the liberal consensus that finally tried to make those rights real.” [2]

“Property” during the 1850s meant slaves, of course, people (often whole families) who were handed down from one generation of white owners to the next like so many heads of livestock. Indeed, the only way many black Americans can identify their ancestors is from white slave owners’ wills, which at times would refer to slaves by first names.

Today, the property in question may not include human beings, but white male dominance forms the basis for both Pompeo’s plan and Project 2025, which look to roll back hard-won civil rights gains, voting rights, women’s rights, the right of children to receive a quality, secular public education (one that isn’t combined with mandated religious practices and instruction), the right of teachers to teach the undistorted truth about our history and the intentions of our Founding Fathers, and the rights of all of us to look to our government for protection against the corporate destruction of our environment.  And this only begins to cover the list of destructive plans contained in Project 2025.

Perhaps, like me, you are reeling from what feels like two coordinated, shocking “reveals” this past week: on one hand, SCOTUS’s outrageous decision to create an imperial presidency, and on the other, this “Project,” which basically intends to overturn the federal government as we have known it, and to do so on behalf of Trump and his loyalists.

Bottom line, Uranus and its tendency to support shockingly disruptive collective action is playing a key role as this election year unfolds, so that is where this post will focus. What is that role? How is Uranian force being deployed? How is it manifesting and through what outer-planetary “channels” is it doing so?

We’ve been issued an alarming wake-up call, my friends, and we need to understand how we’re being taken advantage of and what the true perils of the situation are. Uranus is less about hype than about substance, especially in its present sign, Taurus—all factors that I hope will inform the following discussion.

First, we’ll briefly cast our gazes back in time to see how Uranus dynamics have played out during past crises in the American “experiment,” and then we will examine a couple charts that are significant for the situation today.

 

 

"Red Summer" street mobs ran rampant in 1919.

 

A bit of history

“The United States has always had violent street mobs, from anti-Catholic gangs in the 1830s to Ku Klux Klan chapters in the 1860s to anti-union thugs in the Depression….Get people fighting first and they can be led toward right-wing politics next. In America the hallmark of budding fascism was not intellectuals discussing how to take power; it was populist violence.” [2]

The Ku Klux Klan has had three significant heydays in American history, and interestingly, these periods coincide pretty closely with the timeframes Richardson lays out in the above quote. From Wikipedia:

“The first Klan [1865-1872] founded by Confederate veterans in the late 1860s, assaulted and murdered politically active Black people and their allies in the South.^[17] The second iteration of the Klan originated in the late 1910s [1915-1944], and was the first to use cross burnings and white-hooded robes. The KKK of the 1920s had a nationwide membership in the millions and reflected a cross-section of the native-born white English-speaking and Protestant population.^[18] The third Klan [1946/50-present] formed in the mid 20th century, largely as a reaction to the growing civil rights movement. It used murder and bombings to achieve its aims. All three movements have called for the "purification" of American society, and are all considered far-right extremist organizations.”

Given the well-defined periods that Richardson calls high points for “mob violence” and “populist violence” in American history, the good news is that disparate timeframes can be examined for what they have in common astrologically, so tracing Uranus’s influence shouldn’t be difficult.

For example, In the last post here I noted that Uranus is about to “return” to its position in the Sibly chart in July 2027, which could support Robert’s idea of a “Second American Revolution.” As we’ll see ahead, the Civil War happened during our first Uranus return as a nation, and the attack on Pearl Harbor and our entrance into WWII happened with Uranus in almost the exact same degree in Taurus as we have today. The war as a whole finally wound down around our second return (first exact at the end of May 1944), but a mere two years after, with Winston Churchill’s famous “Iron Curtain” speech, the so-called Cold War with the then-Soviet Union took off.

So, some kind of shocking breakup or attack could well be “in the air” as Uranus travels the dicey road between the final degrees of Taurus and its Sibly return at 8+ Gemini.   

Given all this, we probably have to assume that Kevin Roberts’ implicit threats of a revolution that will be “bloodless, if the left allows it to be” are sincere.

 

"Ouranos," seen here as the Greek god of the Sky.

The astrology

So, what astrological signifiers are we looking for as we dig into this story about Uranus’s involvement in today’s atmosphere of crisis? For starters, combinations of Mars and Uranus can evoke “strong-arm” groups; add Eris into that mix and we have disruptive strong-arm violence. We can also look to the Saturn-Uranus cycle (especially in combination with Mars) to see how authority structures may try to enable vigilante or mob violence in law enforcement and the courts).

Obfuscating and denying law enforcement’s role in order to break down the authority structures and procedures that might hold thugs accountable would also invoke the Saturn-Neptune cycle, which has been intensely involved in recent SCOTUS decisions. The often overlapping energies of the Saturn-Uranus and Saturn-Neptune cycles, of course, evoke the broader Uranus-Neptune cycle that encompasses both of them. In 2024 we’re still in the very New phase of the 1993 Capricorn cycle (its 1Q begins in 2039), so there’s no missing its ambitious earthy background energy in everything that’s going on right now, especially since it’s being powerfully reinforced by the final months of our Sibly Pluto return (late Capricorn) and by Uranus’s current transit into later Taurus.

Lastly, we also cannot discount Jupiter’s contributions to these volatile periods: the Jupiter-Uranus cycle promotes those who—following their beliefs—push boundaries, blaze trails and turn technologies into economic and thus political power, and with Uranus involved, the ideologies being served can skew to the right.

To quickly illustrate how these astrological factors have historically worked together, let’s consider the cyclical facts for the volatile 1830s period that Richardson cites. The entire decade transpires during:

·    ---the 3^rd quarter (1/1820-6/1850) of the Uranus-Pluto cycle that launched in 9/1710 at 28+Aries, so intensely disgruntled and rebellious energy prevailed at the time;

·     ---the New quarter (3/1821-9/1868) of a Uranus-Neptune cycle that launched at 3+Capricorn in 3/1821, so the appetite for a “new world order” within the nation was potent and probably driving events behind the scenes;

·     ---the 2^nd quarter of the 1805 Saturn-Uranus cycle launched at 23+Libra, so the structured ideological balance of the American government that had been maintained to that point was heading into rough territory;

March 1821 also marked the launch of a rebellious Jupiter-Uranus cycle at 13+ Aquarius that probably helped upset that critical balance, just months after a new Jupiter-Neptune cycle had launched at 21+Capricorn in 12/1820. The economic quest would risk breaking down authority structures ahead.

 

The scene in Congress as the 1920 compromise was debated.

So clearly, there was more about this pre-Civil War time frame than anti-Catholic mobs attacking immigrants, but that mob violence was a wake-up call about things to come. The Missouri Compromise had been passed in 1820 (at the beginning of the Uranus-Pluto 3Q noted above) to legislate where new slave states would be admitted and where they wouldn’t—the aim being (also noted) to keep a “balance” of sorts in the midst of the nation’s rapidly expanding list of states.

Not surprisingly, the clash of ruling ideologies that had been simmering beneath the surface of American politics forever produced violent wranglings between the slave- and non-slave states in Congress, such that the so-called Compromise of 1850—a last ditch effort of that year’s Congress to hammer out a workable accommodation between slave- and non-slave states—simply failed to hold the nation together. Considering 1850 was the year Uranus and Pluto formed a fiery new cycle at 29+ Aries, astrologers probably saw that coming.  

In short, the tensions of that entire Uranus-Pluto 3Q set the stage for the bigger story of clashing ideologies and the failure to compromise that finally tore the nation apart in the 1860s. Significantly, Uranus fell conjunct Mars in early Gemini and both fell conjunct the nation’s Sibly Uranus when the first shots of the Civil War were fired on April 12, 1861 (Chart 1 below), so the nation was in the throes of its first 84-year Uranus return.

 

Chart 1. The U.S. Civil War, April 12, 1861, 4:30 a.m., Charleston, SC. Source: Wikipedia.org. All charts are cast by author on Kepler 8.0, with Tropical Equal Houses, True Node and courtesy of Cosmic Patterns Software.

 

This also meant that Uranus was—like today—transiting Taurus during most of that 1850-1860 lead-up to the war. The ideologically entrenched economic considerations of the slave states and the growing zeal for the abolition of slavery in the northern states were always fated to clash because they were simply not ethically, morally and culturally compatible, despite the South’s attempt to use Christian doctrine to justify slavery. 

 

The Civil War looms large in American consciousness.

 

The 1860s

Here, then, is the cyclical picture for that volatile 1860s period we know as the Civil War. Not surprisingly, some details overlap with the 1830s picture laid out above:

·     ---In 1860, two key cycles from the 1830s were still in New quarters: the 6/1850 Uranus-Pluto cycle and the 1821 Uranus-Neptune cycle, signaling continued social and economic pressure to create a revolutionary new political order;

·     ---Also in its New quarter at the time was an earthy 29+ Taurus Jupiter-Uranus cycle that perfected in May 1858; war always seems to serve economic purposes and the Civil War was no different, supporting the railroad technologies that would jumpstart the post-Civil War Robber Baron era.  

·     ---This economic focus was structurally supported at the time by the 1852 Taurus Saturn-Uranus cycle that had just begun its disruptive Vir-Gem 1^st quarter in December, 1860, barely a month after the divisive election of Abraham Lincoln as president. 

----Also significant, this 1^st quarter launched with Uranus moving retrograde from 10+Gemini back over Sibly Uranus (8°55’ Gemini) and thus tying into the nation’s Uranus return. Uranus turned direct in February 1861 at 8 degrees Gemini exactly, the same month the Confederacy was formed by the states that seceded right after the election. Uranus was tightly conjunct Sibly Uranus and clearly driving the crisis throughout its return.

 

1930's bread line for the Depression's unemployed workers

The 1930s

We’ve seen how the Uranus-charged combination of economic and ideological concerns was key to our early history of division and violence, but we may be less familiar with how that same formula worked to almost rip apart the nation during the 1930s Depression era. Uranus did indeed play a role in the anti-union thuggery and populist violence that characterized the period between the two World Wars: White workers were pitted against black and immigrant workers by corporate bosses and their reps; as always, divide and conquer was the chief strategy for moving right-wing agendas and the depressed economy made sure people were desperate enough to go along.

So what were the astrological drivers of that era? Using the 1930s as the key period, the cycles in play were:

·     ---The Cap-Can 2^nd quarter of the 1821 Uranus-Neptune cycle (Capricorn) had kicked in during 1906, so security concerns and ambitious materiality were the order of the day. Uranus fell at 8+Aries, opposite Libra Venus when the Stock Market crashed in October 1929, taking the economy down with it; by the time Uranus first ingressed Taurus in June 1934, FDR’s New Deal had moved the nation forward, but full recovery didn’t happen until the U.S. entered WWII. On that note,

·     ---The 3^rd quarter of the 1850 Uranus-Pluto cycle we’ve seen so much of launched between 20+ Aries-Cancer in April 1932, the year FDR was elected on the platform of a “New Deal” for Americans. This election also transpired during the Cancer-Aries 1^st quarter of the 1928 Jupiter-Uranus cycle—aggressive new technological advancements were pushing for big things to happen and the looming war effort didn’t disappoint.

·     ---In 1930, another dose of potent—and often violent—cardinal energies was added to the above mix with the Capricorn-Aries 3^rd quarter of the 1897 Saturn-Uranus cycle. Populist violence of the kind Richardson cites may have looked like the only solution for those who had nothing to feed their families and found themselves unable to protect their own in any other way. Even so, the “anti-union thugs” that were known to attack workers would have been unleashed by corporate moguls at the time; it would take the only woman appointed to FDR’s cabinet, Francis Perkins, to break away from past realities and promote the almost unimaginable cause of labor rights and protections. The era that today’s corporate heads still love to hate had begun.

There’s so much more going on during this volatile 1930s period than I can document here, of course, but the point here is to trace key Uranus-related influences.

 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's hopeful 1932 election motto.

 

A common thread binding all our major crises

Fast-forwarding into our current reality, Heather Cox Richardson again helps put things into perspective:

“There was a straight line from the anti–New Deal violence of the 1930s to the street brawlers at Charlottesville. Since the 1950s, opponents of the liberal consensus had urged supporters to think of themselves as heroic, individualistic cowboys who had not only the right but also the duty to protect their families from the alleged socialism of the government. That narrative initially helped to spark extraordinary violence against Black Americans and other minorities, but by 1992, right-wing violence had begun to shift toward violence against the government itself.” [3]

Richardson’s reference to “Charlottesville” here is about the August 11-12, 2017 neo-fascist “Unite the Right” rally that killed one counter-protestor and wounded several others. Despite the violence and hatefulness on display in the rally by the present day Klan and like-minded extremist organizations, however, then-president Trump justified it all by saying there were “very fine people on both sides.”

Uranus was Rx in late Aries and formed a fiery grand trine with the Leo North Node and Sagittarius Saturn. This was the 1988 Saturn-Uranus cycle’s waning trine, clearly marking the tiki torch-bearing protestors’ fiery determination (and the ease they experienced with Trump getting their message across) to attack civil rights protections and intimidate non-white, non-Christian Americans. 

Event poster for this controversial 2017 rally.

 

The Aquarius South Node on that day—disposed by that fiery Uranus—bisected the grand trine, turning an already wildly volatile aspect into a more rare Kite configuration, which Trump gave “wings” to with his tacit support.   

As for the volatile 1990s that Richardson references, Uranus was intensely involved, and attacking perceived government oppression was, indeed, often the issue. This anti-government perspective manifested in:

·    --A weeks’ long siege in Boundary County, Idaho in August 1992 that’s become known as the Ruby Ridge standoff, between a man who refused to respond to a bench warrant against him (on federal firearms charges) and the armed U.S. marshals who came to arrest him. The 1988 Saturn-Uranus cycle (29+ Sagittarius) was in its New quarter, with Saturn in Aquarius and Uranus in Capricorn, so the heavy arm of the Law was matched by the raw and ultimately deadly defiance of the subject.

·     ---A federal siege of the Branch-Davidian religious cult’s compound in Waco, TX in February 1993, just in time for the new Uranus-Neptune cycle to perfect in mid-Capricorn.

·     ---The Oklahoma City bombing (executed in remembrance of Waco on Apr 19 1995). The 1965 Uranus-Pluto cycle and the 1993 Uranus-Neptune cycles were still in New quarters and Uranus had just ingressed home sign Aquarius, triggering rebellious impulses; the 1983 Jupiter-Uranus cycle (8+Sag) had reached its 3^rd quarter by then, so tearing things down with a bang would have been supported. The fiery 1988 Saturn-Uranus cycle was still in New quarter, with Saturn in Pisces and Uranus in Aquarius.

·     ---The Columbine H.S. massacre on April 20, 1999 was executed by two students brandishing long guns, killing 12 of their classmates and 1 teacher, wounding many more, and then turning the guns on themselves. It was the first notable school shooting/suicide in U.S. history and started a long, sordid trend that we’re still living with today.  Both Uranus and Neptune occupied Aquarius and the 1988 Saturn-Uranus cycle was about to reach its 1^st quarter between Taurus-Aquarius. Mars fell in home sign Scorpio, exactly opposite Saturn in Taurus and this pair t-squared Neptune. The attack seemed to come out of nowhere, but there were telling clues beforehand that were simply ignored, and the shooters had easy access to an arsenal of guns.

Meanwhile, there was different, but equally significant violence being wreaked on the working classes of this nation in the 1990s by widespread globalization, the passing of global trade agreements and the outsourcing of U.S. manufacturing jobs, done in the interest of “flattening” the world economy and freeing up Capital to roam wherever investments beckoned, with few government restraints and/or taxation. Well-suited for the aggressive cardinal energies circulating at the time, globalization effectively reinvented the economic world order, rendering labor protections mostly toothless and forcing workers to accept seriously lower wages.

We’ve talked about the dynamics that drove globalization at length on this site, so I will leave this discussion for now, but the take away for our purposes here is that Uranus has been instrumental in all the shocking crises we’ve weathered as a nation, and it continues to be today, as we anticipate yet another Uranus return in 2027.

 

 

Looking forward

With that in mind, let’s consider a biwheel that illustrates that 2027 Sibly Uranus return by placing the return chart around the radix Sibly chart. It may be difficult to interpret what we see in the absence of 2024 election results, but perhaps not knowing who will be in the White House will also be instructive. Let’s begin.

 

Biwheel 1. (inner wheel) US (Sibly) chart, July 4, 1776, 5:10 p.m. LMT, Philadelphia, PA. Source: Ebenezer Sibly, cited and documented by Nicholas Campion, The Book of World Horoscopes, Chart #370, pp. 363-4; (outer wheel) Uranus return, US Sibly chart, July 26, 2027, 9:10:52 p.m. DST, Washington, D.C.

 

The aspects formed by Return Uranus (all in the outer wheel) are particularly notable here: 1) an airy grand trine with Return Pluto Rx (Aquarius)-Return No. Node (widely conjunct) and Return Mars, and 2) a trine/sextile wedge configuration with Mars (Gemini) and Neptune Rx (Aries). Here, Uranus trines Mars, sextiles Neptune Rx (Gemini-Aries), and Mars opposes Neptune Rx (Libra-Aries).  

Uranus seems prepared to deliver on super-lucrative technological promises here (trine Pluto-North Node) and some of those technologies could involve connecting our nation in ways that constitute a kind of “soft” surveillance state, similar to the one that influences everything Chinese citizens do. The advent of AI everything is all but assured in the near future, so if we think our lives are totally focused around our phones now, just wait. 

 

 

This grand trine also seems to suggest a more empowered and less accountable corporate sector (Pluto), and with Return Uranus re-energizing the nation’s original military impulses (conjoining Sibly Uranus in 6^th) and trine Return Mars (even in its muted condition), that sector might find new wars to promote—lucrative new defense technologies will likely be waiting in the wings as well. As we know from the Iraq war, it’s a simple matter to float misinformation (Mars opposite Neptune Rx) to create the demand for an unjustifiable invasion. 

Our entire history says war creates jobs—here we see Return Jupiter opposite Sibly Moon (the People)—suggesting more of the same. Will we see a return to the mandatory military draft someday soon? With this Uranus return widely square Return Jupiter in early Virgo, we might want to keep that possibility in mind.

One final note about the Uranian influence in that Aquarius Return North Node, widely conjunct Return Pluto Rx. Aquarius calls for collective, potentially rebellious action, but the transiting North node will have begun its tour of Aquarius in August 2026, which appears to be another potentially volatile time. The fact that Uranus will be transiting trine Aquarius Pluto from the moment it ingresses Gemini in April 2026 and throughout that year definitely raises the stakes for Uranus watchers.

 

 

Final thoughts

I have to admit that with all this Uranus activity building over the next couple years, I am uneasy about the lure of autocracy in a hyper-technologized world, a lure that can easily snare people with the promise of simple solutions to complex problems. Worried about a dangerous, increasingly climate change-ravaged world? Time to resort to strong-man leaders who can do whatever they see fit with zero accountability (thanks, SCOTUS!). Leaders who can force compliance and conformity by imposing simple technological overlays to every situation. Who will make sure our actions are tracked for their “loyalty” quotient—all that matters is loyalty…everything else follows, including survival. One false move, no benefits. Another false move, no health care. The more people rebel, the more resources flow to the top…where else?

Simple, right? Yes, democracy is messy…and human.

It’s a disturbing vision, but we have lots of disturbing decisions to make this year and in the years ahead. Does the choice of candidates even matter when we’re asked to choose between totally incompatible forms of government? If Dems represent the only party still working for democracy, I will personally vote for the donkey on their banners before I will vote for an autocratic candidate. I’ve seen what dictators do to people—there’s no contest.

I believe we're better than all this and that we DO have choices...keep it Light, folks!

 

 

 

Notes:

[1] Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition, p. 144.

[2] Ibid., p. 111.

[3] Ibid., p. 112.

 

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Raye Robertson is a practicing astrologer, writer and retired educator. A graduate of the Faculty of Astrological Studies (U.K.), Raye focuses on mundane, collective-oriented astrology, with a particular interest in current affairs, U.S. history, culture and media, the astrology of generations, and public concerns such as education and health. Her articles on these topics have appeared in several key astrology journals over the years, and she has authored three books on key mundane astrology topics that are currently available on Amazon Kindle. For information about individual chart readings, contact: robertsonraye@gmail.com.

© Raye Robertson 2024. All rights reserved.