Uranus is sitting at the 29th degree of Taurus, taking a deep breath before he moves from the conservative, fixed earth sign into the buzzing, mutable air spirit of Gemini on July 7th 2025. The 29th degree of a sign is the ‘anaretic’ degree in astrology, derived from the Greek word for ‘destroyer’. It signifies the end of a cycle, where we see the culmination of the sign’s energy. This final degree can bring collective chaos and internal anxiety as the planet prepares for a new beginning in the next sign. While rebellious Uranus has been travelling though conservative Taurus since 2018 the world has been shaken by financial and political crises, climate chaos and a pandemic, we’ve seen the rise of right wing politics that appeal to a mythical, simpler age and seeks to reign in liberal progressive thinking. A manifestation of this is the rise of prejudice and persecution of LGBTQ+ people, with our community on the receiving end of a backlash after two decades of continuous progress in the cause of equal rights.
Uranus moves into Gemini on July 7th – this summer we will be getting our first taste of the Geminian-Uranian energy coming for the next seven years once he settles into the sign for the long haul from April 2026. But first he has to finish up a very tough seven year journey through earth sign Taurus, and this will take a little time – Uranus will be returning to 29 degrees Taurus from November 7th – December 1st this year and again April 5-25th, 2026.
In the Sabian astrological symbol system, the energy of the 29th degree of Taurus is said to be about ‘Respecting other ways of being and doing‘ – and after the rocky Uranian ride through Taurus since 2018 the world desperately needs some of that! It is about understanding someone else’s way of being and accepting that life requires objectivity about our own opinions and beliefs. At a time when the queer community is divided as never before – with some gay men and lesbians seeking to separate the TQ+ from the LGB – this arrival of Uranus at the last degree of Taurus, is timely – it coincides with Pride celebrations around the world, a time when all parts of our rainbow tribe come together to declare our proud right to love, life and liberty. Hopefully this moment will help us see through our differences, and in any case the astrology shows we will be returning to this energy later in the year, so there’s still some time to bring home this feeling of belonging to each other before the queer guide Uranus reaches the lighter, more open skies of Gemini.
And hopefully this applies to all the terrible conflicts currently blighting our beautiful world. It’s time to put down the weapons and learn to respect each other:
The Sabian symbol for 29 degrees of Taurus is TWO COBBLERS WORKING AT A TABLE.
“Mature understanding arises out of seeing the other point of view, and the deepening of wisdom moves towards having less staunch opinions on matters. New experiences test our maturity of wisdom; do we react in a knee-jerk manner and take up a posture, or can we work collaboratively with another to deepen our knowledge?”
Uranus was not at home in Taurus, the sign of its ‘detriment’. Taurus represents stability and tradition, an uncomfortable place for the sparky, spontaneous and rebellious Uranian spirit, which is associated astrologically with revolution, sudden change, innovation, technology, intelligence, eccentricity and earthquakes! The last time Uranus was in Taurus was 1934-42, a period which saw the rise of repressive regimes and suppression of gay life in the USA and Russia as well as in Germany where that effort reached its peak of destructiveness. The current passage through Taurus has seen the rise of authoritarian political figures and the rights of queer people, especially trans people, come under fierce attack again – the world has become less safe for us, the general population less accepting, and even our own community divided and arguing with itself.
In my opinion there’s really much more to Uranus than most astrologers seem to consider. The planet’s name points to this – Ouranus was the Greek word for the primordial energy of ‘heaven’. Uranus represents ‘higher’, ‘divine’ states of consciousness. When Uranus was identified as a planet by William Herschel in 1781 (it had been previously mistaken for a star), it took some time for the name to be settled but Uranus became the obvious candidate, he being the Father of Saturn, which planet had until then been the outermost limit of the known solar system.
The discovery of Uranus coincided with an expansion in human consciousness – the European ‘Enlightenment’ plus revolutions in America and France opened a new era in human society. I see Uranus as guiding the expansion of our consciousness – as we grow in understanding of who we are and what we are doing here on the earth, Uranus guides our quest for individual and collective liberation, which can only really come through knowing our part in the whole. I see Uranus as connecting and uniting the individual’s mind with the collective divine mind (then Neptune connects us to the collective ocean of divine emotion, and Pluto to the emptiness, the void, the primordial darkness that gave rise to all existence).
The passage of Uranus through the signs can be viewed as a guide to our collective journey of re-connection to the unity of consciousness/spirit – and also to the journey that spirit’s ‘natural priests’ are on as we rediscover and reclaim what we are here for– many of those natural priests are among the modern gay, lesbian, bi and trans community but were once known by many others names in pre-Christian cultures. Among our queer ancestors around the planet there were those who once fulfilled the roles of gatekeepers, witches and shamans, keeping the community in touch with the healing energies of the earth and the unseen worlds, with the ‘gods’. The deep spiritual nature of people who are gender-variant, non-binary of same-sex erotically attracted has become invisible in modern culture due to centuries of repression, but it’s still there, waiting to re-ignite, as teachings such as those from the Dagara people of west Africa, the experience of the Two Spirit Native Americans and the wisdom of eastern cultures can reveal.
The suppression of gender-variance and same sex love has been nothing less than a spiritual crime that disconnects humanity from its own source, by making these natural – even holy – traits into something abominable in the minds of the people, religion cut us off from the freedom in our own human souls.
Uranus is considered to be the ruling planet of Aquarius, the sign of Ganymede the beloved cup-bearer to Jupiter – the sign shows an aspect of how same sex love fits into the big picture of human consciousness and evolution: the ancients understood something that the modern world has little notion of: that same sex love connects the physical and spiritual realms. Many ancient deities had same sex love affairs, revealing that these were considered entirely natural. Some of the most popular gods worshiped in the ancient world, such as Dionysus, Attis and the Great Mother herself, were considered gender-fluid. Apollo the sun god was depicted as an effeminate man who had many male lovers, while his sister Artemis/Diana of the Moon did not have sex with men, nor did her priestesses.
In the mythology of Uranus, the primordial god of the slow paced, peaceful, eternity of the Bronze Age, was castrated by his own son, Chronos/Saturn – his testicles fell into the Ocean (from which then arose Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love), and time, conflict and confusion began in the world. Uranus retired to the heavens to dedicate his life to artistic pursuits, and there he hid until the 18th century, but soon after the planet was discovered a spirit of liberty took a strong hold of some people’s minds (manifesting in the American and French revolutions), and a collective journey to liberty – political, social, sexual and spiritual – which we are still undertaking – and which in the 2020s is reaching a peak point of crisis and transformation – began.
The French revolution is significant as a huge turning point in the history of men who love men. The new order in France, influenced by the emerging philosophies of the European Enlightenment, dropped all the laws which had been around since the Middle Ages against same sex relations. It took the UK another two centuries to achieve this.
Uranus was in the early degrees of the sign of Cancer when Herschel identified it in 1781. Cancer is the sign ruled by the Moon, the sign most associated with divine feminine love; he was in the proud fire sign Leo at the time of the French revolution. He reached Cancer again in the 1860s, which is when the death penalty for sodomy was finally repealed in the UK – then for a couple of decades, despite harsh legal penalties still in place, there was a period where a ‘gay’ sensibility started to find its voice – in the plays of Oscar Wilde, the writings of John Addington Symonds, and books such as ‘The Sins of the Cities of the Plain’, which purported to be the memoirs of Jack Saul, a young rentboy or “Mary-Ann”, and which revealed the not insubstantial queer erotic underworld of the time. The late 19th century saw some intellectual gay men choosing to call themselves ‘Uranians’ in reference to Plato’s Symposium, in order to emphasise the spiritual and creative aspect of their queer nature, as opposed to the erotic aspect emphasised by the new term ‘homosexual’ that ‘science’, in the form of psychiatrists and sociologists was adopting. In the Symposium, Aphrodite Urania is named as the Goddess of same-sex ‘heavenly’ love and her more down-to-earth aspect Aphrodite Pandemos (‘of the people’) as the patron of the more mundane experiences of lust and reproductive sex,.
The 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, declaring its goal was ‘the Protection of Women and Girls’, raised the age of consent from 13 to 16, but also used this justification to close down brothels and to criminalise, for the first time in legal history, all sexual contact between males, not simply anal sex. The Labouchere Amendment, slipped into the act without proper debate, introduced the crime of gross indecency and led to the arrest of many more men during the next 100 years than had happened under the sodomy laws. The law and the Oscar Wilde trials in the 1890s seriously held back any emerging English gay subculture of the likes that was emerging in Berlin in the late 19th-early 20th century, and which flourished during the 1920s Weimar Republic. But that flourishing was crushed in the 1930s Nazi period – the last time that Uranus was struggling through the sign of his ‘detriment’, Taurus. Not only in Germany but also in the USA, Russia and elsewhere a rising suspicion of queerness was leading to more control and repression – which eventually led to the emergence of gay groups speaking up for themselves and starting to demand their rights.
The first campaigning group for gay rights in the USA, the Mattachine Society, was created in 1950, while Uranus was once more visiting the Divine Mother’s sign Cancer. My feeling is that after the beating gay culture took while Uranus was in Taurus in the 1930s, his passage through Gemini 1942-48 brought many men close together in extreme conflict situations that produced deep bonding and love and set the scene for a self-conscious gay campaigning group to arise.
When the spark moment for gay rights came with the Stonewall Riots, June 28- July 1st, 1969, Uranus had just completed its journey through Virgo four days earlier and was settling into its long stay in Libra, the sign of balance and justice. The revolutionary Uranian energy burst forth, anger manifesting and the modern LGBTQ+ liberation movement was born.
1975-81 Uranus in Scorpio brought a period of liberated gay sexual exploration that the west had never known before, the legal shackles were off and the religious ones were falling away – but there was a sting in the scorpionic tale – HIV/AIDS, a manifestation it might be said of the dark shadow that had been cast on gay sex for centuries, and which was still sitting within the men at play.
1981-88 Uranus in Sagittarius saw the queer community find strength in numbers as the AIDS crisis forced us to get organised. Suddenly gay people had more visibility in the world, numbers at Pride events grew. 1988-96 in Capricorn saw gay campaigning and community spirit reach new levels of cohesion and achievement.
1996-2003 Uranus in Aquarius, its home sign brought major advances in gay liberation, with fairer laws enacted, sodomy laws repealed, civil partnerships approved. When Uranus was in Pisces 2003-11 this trend continued, with gay marriage spreading through the western world.
Uranus is Aries 2011-18 saw a surge of desire for liberation – the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, and brought a revolution in the Aries theme of identity. Uranus began a new cycle of the zodiac, bringing his revolutionary energies to the very question of who we are. And of course this affected the queer community the deepest. The idea that gender is a construct took off, the queer alphabet expanded, queer flags exploded. Queerness seemed to be rising high, with the goal of liberation for all, the right for everyone to simply be who they are.
But some people felt that queers were trying to impose their ‘alternative’ lifestyles, their values, their sexuality, their gender-fluidity on the whole world, and they started to resist. Uranus in Taurus brought the fightback from the conservatives, exactly the same pattern as had happened in the 1930s. At that time the largely hidden but actually quite flourishing queer scenes of the early 20th century were, by the end of the second world war, wiped out, and after the war a new conservative conventionality was imposed on society by the education system and mass media. It took a few decades for queer life to find its feet again.
As Uranus reaches Gemini in 2025-6 the situation for queer people looks more precarious than it has for decades. I haven’t even mentioned the atrocious anti-gay policies going on in some African countries, which have spread during the Taurus transit. The stories from there are heartbreaking. But suddenly things in the west don’t look so sweet either. Where we can live openly our scenes are still vibrant and our presence in the world is obviously much stronger than in the 1930s, but this visibility also leads to the attacks on us becoming more pronounced too. The US government has tried to limit the definition of gender to male or female, to eradicate trans identity – the British attempted to do the same in late 19th century India when they outlawed the hijra community, a group that is now once again being recognised for its spiritual qualities. The British Supreme Court recently declared that only ‘biological women are women’ but shortly afterward the Indian Court decreed that transgender women are indeed, legally and socially, women.
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Gemini is the sign of communication, I believe the conversation men had with each other during and after the second world war when Uranus was last in Gemini led to the birth of the gay rights movement when he reached Cancer. As this pattern repeats, the next seven years can be a time when the LGBTQ+ movement talks to itself about its history, nature and purpose, much more than it has taken the time to do so far. We have been so busy celebrating our freedom, and negotiating the horrific challenges of AIDS and more recently an epidemic of drug addiction among gay men, that we have hardly had time to stop and think clearly. The result is some of us are shouting about who is in the movement and who isn’t – a sure sign that we need to reflect collectively about what the movement actually is. Uranus at 29 degrees of Taurus is inviting us, or even telling us, to listen to each other and respect each other’s points of view, each other’s ways of being and doing.
Uranus at 29 degrees of Taurus is also telling us to take a breath. To slow down and get some perspective, to process and release the tiring battles of the last 7 years, as we prepare for a much more promising transit through Gemini, through to 2032, after which Uranus will come home again to the Mother spirit of Cancer, so let’s set the goal that the Uranian people — the LGBTQ+ community — and all people everywhere, finally be able to live safely and feel free and at home on planet Earth.
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URANUS IN GEMINI AWAKENING & COMMUNICATION EVOLUTION – AstroGita
How to Deal with This Transition by Margarita Ivanova- Gita
- During 29 Degrees Taurus:
Reflect on your values: What truly matters to you, and are you aligning your life with those priorities?
Stay flexible: Uranus often brings surprises, so embracing change rather than resisting it will help you adapt gracefully.
Focus on grounding: Practices like mindfulness or connecting with nature can help you stay centered during this intense time.
- When Uranus Moves to Gemini:
Embrace your curiosity: New opportunities for learning and connection will likely emerge. Be open to exploring fresh ideas or technologies.
Plan but stay adaptable: Changes might come quickly, but your natural Gemini flexibility will be your superpower.
- During Uranus Retrograde:
Review your progress: What changes have occurred since Uranus first entered Gemini, and how can you refine them?
Take your time: Retrogrades are a time for reflection, not rushing forward.
How to Navigate the Transition of Uranus in Gemini?
Journal Your Experiences: Write down any themes or lessons that come up during this period.
Be Open to Change: Uranus teaches us to embrace the unexpected, so trust the process, even if things feel uncertain.
Self-Care is Key: Big shifts can be overwhelming. Prioritize activities that nourish your body, mind, and spirit.
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