Three Histories of Uranus - Astrology in the Year Zero

Three Histories of Uranus Page 14
quite compatible. Certainly astrologers treat the planets as being able to
show some sort of order in the world from a basic (implicate) pattern.
Sheldrake 25 suggests that a natural extension of the morphic field approach
would be to regard entire planets as organisms with characteristic morphic
fields and for an astrologer this would not be a great leap. Using the planet
Saturn as an example – because we are in the cosmos, animals, plants and
men resonate with this field. Astrologers have long associated the following
principles with Saturn (to name a few): structure, the material world,
concrete things, clarity, authority, tradition, form, wisdom, ancient things.
This has strong similarities to what might be in the ‘science’ morphic field
beginning with Newton. Scientists resonate well to what might be a Saturn
morphic field.
In fact Gauquelin found a connection between Saturn and scientists. This
would mean that as science develops, scientists’ ideas affect the Saturn field.
For many astrologers this would be a new idea as I believe that most
astrologers see Saturn as a fixed principle but this would need further
investigation. As this is an archetype, to use Jung’s terminology, if one has
one part of the archetype then one automatically has the others, so this
could mean that scientists, due to being part of this field have also earned
respect and authority in the world as a kind of by-product of going along with
the ‘concrete’ way of thinking and acting. It would be interesting to study
how views of Saturn have changed over the years among astrologers to
study if there is a link with the image of scientists but this is outside the
scope of this paper. This paper will apply this theory to the beliefs generated
about Uranus for the three groups. My hypothesis is that the ‘Uranus’
morphic field has become associated with (amongst others) astrologers due
to input into the field and the gradual stabilising of that field after 1781. Man
as a whole has helped create what Uranus means even if Uranus is not “just
a rock and has a nature of its own”.
Strands of History
For the Average Man
Based on our experience of news today, one might expect that the discovery
of a planet would have been big news to the average man as what this
discovery in fact did was double the size of the known universe 26 . In fact in
the ‘Amsterdam Courant’ newspapers from March 1781 onwards, there is no
mention of ‘Georgium Sidus’, the name Uranus was first given by Herschel,
or in fact anything scientific. The newspapers, which came out twice a week
and for important things like the forming of the USA sometimes on a Sunday,
were divided into countries, deaths and debts and house sales. Almost all the
25 Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past, pp.300-301.
26 Quote from Peter Hingley of the Royal Astronomical Society.