The Uranus Line in Astrocartography

William Herschel found Uranus with a telescope in his garden in Bath on March 13, 1781, the first planet found with a telescope. It is just bright enough to see without one under a dark sky, and John Flamsteed had already catalogued it as a star, 34 Tauri, in 1690. Herschel wanted to call it Georgium Sidus, after George III; Johann Bode's suggestion, Uranus, won out over the following decades. Traditional astrology, built on the seven visible bodies, had no meaning ready for it. Astrologers usually explain the meaning it now carries by the times it was found in, the decades of the American and French revolutions, and by a century and a half of looking at charts since. Maps in Lewis's style draw Uranus, Neptune and Pluto with the seven traditional bodies: forty lines in all rather than twenty-eight.

Uranus takes about 84 years to circle the zodiac, roughly seven years in each sign, so everyone born within a few months of each other has Uranus in almost the same degree. In 1961 it was in Leo: Obama's Uranus at 25°16′ Leo had turned direct on April 29, 1961 at 21°39′ Leo and would turn retrograde on December 6, 1961 at 0°32′ Virgo. It was also drawing toward Pluto: the two met three times, on October 9, 1965, April 4, 1966 and June 30, 1966, in Virgo. Richard Tarnas, in Cosmos and Psyche (2006), ties the upheavals of the 1960s to that conjunction.

For the example chart, the certificate's 7:24 PM in Hawaii on August 4, 1961 converts to 05:24 UTC and puts Barack Obama's Uranus at 25°16′ Leo, 12°43′ ahead of the Sun. The astrocartography map requests his lines from the site's API; we made the same request, tested every returned point against the Swiss Ephemeris and measured the cities around each line.

In Obama's chart Uranus and the Sun are both in Leo, 12°43′ apart, so his Uranus lines run close to his Sun lines: Uranus's meridian sits 12°31′ east of the Sun's noon meridian through Bangkok, and Uranus set 45 minutes after the Sun in Honolulu. Pluto, then moving toward its meeting with Uranus, sits on the other side: Pluto's MC line lies 11°09′ further east, through Manchuria. Three of his ten MC lines therefore fall within about 24° of longitude in East and Southeast Asia.

Uranus stays close to the ecliptic, never more than 0°49′ off it between 1900 and 2050. For Obama, 0°41′ north and 19.3 AU away, the in mundo lines Jim Lewis drew and the site's zodiacal ones are close:

Because Uranus moves so slowly, people born in the same season share its zodiac degree, and it is fair to call Uranus a generational planet in a birth chart. On a map it is not. Its lines depend on where on Earth Uranus was angular at the moment of birth, which the Earth's rotation sweeps around the globe once a day. A birth the next day at the same clock time shifts the Uranus lines only 0°55′, but a birth half an hour later on the same day shifts them 7°31′.

For Obama that half hour would change almost everything. The Uranus MC line would move to Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Chongqing, Chengdu, Singapore and Jakarta; the IC line to New York, Philadelphia, Montréal, Bogotá and Medellín; the rising line to London, Paris, Barcelona and Kinshasa; and the setting line, now just east of Hawaii, would run through Honolulu itself.

Measured against Jim Lewis's widest orb, 700 miles (from his 1982 Cyclo*Carto*Graphy handbook; his 1976 figure was a quarter-inch of map, about 300 to 400 miles), Obama's Uranus lines reach 928 of the site's cities, 40% of the list, second only to his Moon lines. Uranus lines are often described as chapters rather than homes, and the pre-filled map shows how much of the world its four lines touch.