The planet Uranus has transited across the Midheaven of the United States chart three times since the country was founded. From the symbolism of the planet — Uranus — involved and the point of the chart — Midheaven — one would would expect a, possibly revolutionary, change happening to the United States, something that would effect its basic manifest principles and be obvious to outside observers.
Here is a chart for the first time Uranus transited the MC. This date was when the election was taking place – remember that at that time there was no single election day. The important event that happened at this time was called by Thomas Jefferson, who was intimately involved, the Revolution of 1800. The story of what this revolution was takes us back to those early years of the Republic. The bugs weren’t totally worked out of the Constitution, and there had been only three elections for President, and only two Presidents. The concept of “political parties” had only formed in the last few years, and the concept had not yet fully jelled.
The Constitution required that, after the Electoral College voted for President, that the top vote getter would be President and the second highest vote getter would be Vice-President. In the previous election of 1796, this had resulted in the candidates of two different parties being elected. Remember at the time the concept of parties was not very well formed. In that election John Adams, who had been Washington’s Vice-President, was elected President; he represented the Federalist Party. His Vice-President was Thomas Jefferson, the candidate of the Democratic (or Republican or Democrat-Republican ) party. He had been Secretary of State under George Washington. This was most unusual, since the two parties had the two different top Federal offices. Adams and Jefferson had been close friends, but they drifted apart (they would later get back together). In fact, they both died on the same day, July 4 (!) , 1826. The rumor has it that the messenger reporting Jefferson’s death, on his way to Quincy to John Adams house, passed the messenger to report Adams’ death on the highway.
Next came the Election of 1800. John Adams, who had served one term, was running again, on the Federalist Party, and his Vice-President, Thomas Jefferson, was running against him as a Democrat. Also running was Aaron Burr, also a Democrat, and Charles Pinckney, also a Federalist. Though it was thought that Jefferson and Adams were Presidential candidates, it was never specified. There was no winner of the Electoral vote, so, as specified in the Constitution, the election result was determined by the vote in the House of Representatives, with each state getting one vote.
This was the last gasp of the Federalist party — they never won another presidential election, and within a decade they would be gone from the political scene — and so perhaps they wanted to make it difficult for the upcoming Democratic Party. In the House the vote for President was 36 votes for Jefferson and 36 votes for Burr, the two highest vote getters. Since it was a tie the House needed to vote again. So for several months during the long winter of 1800-01 — the Inauguration was scheduled for March 20, according to the Constitution until it was amended to move Inauguration Day two months earlier — each vote for President resulted in the same tie between Jefferson and Burr. Things were getting desperate and there was talk of a civil war. Here was the first disputed election in the new country, and it wasn’t turning out well at all.
One needs to look at the political situation at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century to get an appreciation of what was going through people’s minds not only in the United States but in Europe as well. There had also recently been a revolution in France , less than 20 years after the American Revolution, and that had devolved into the Time of Terrors with much use of the guillotine; finally there had been the coup of the Eighteenth of Brumaire a little over a year before by Napoleon Bonaparte. The French had established a Revolutionary calendar, with months corresponding to astrological signs, so that eighteenth of Burmaire (Scorpio) corresponds to November 9, 1799. Since things had gone so wrong with the French Revolution, it was normal to expect things to go wrong with the American Revolution, and this seemed to be an example. People wondered if the American experiment would survived the Election of 1800.
Finally on the thirty-sixth ballot, one state changed its vote so that Jefferson had one more vote than Burr and so there was a new President, selected before Inauguration Day. The country was saved. As I mentioned before, this kerfuffle was due to a bug in the initial Constitution, and the matter was changed with the Twelfth Amendment.
This was “The Revolution of 1800”. At the time it was possibly the end of the United States as whole entity. But the country pulled through, electing the third President of the United States. But it was very appropriate to the first pass of Uranus over the Midheaven of the United States.
Currently, a Supreme Court decision called Citizens United (Citizens United v Federal Election Commission) is considered what made corporation people. But corporations have long been recognized as people by the Supreme Court, using the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment was passed in 1868 to recognize that the recently freed slaves had due process and equal protection under the law, but it spoke of this as applying to “people” rather than “natural people”. Some have suggested that this wording was due to Roscoe Conkling, a Republican Senator from New York who was member of the Stalwart faction of the Republicans and, incidentally, a Scorpio. Conkling was a major fixer in the State of New York and a power behind Chester A. Arthur, who became the 21st President of the United States. In any case, the 14th Amendment has been applied to corporations more often that flesh and blood human being since it was first added to the Constitution.
But this all started with a Supreme Court decision called Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad Co. The decision was the result of several attempt by counties in California to tax railroads. The State had lost the decision. But of much more consequence was something the decision did not say. A note added to the decision by a clerk (who had been president of a railroad) said that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to Corporations; this became accepted as part of the decision ever since, even though it wasn’t. This was the first time that corporations were declared as people under the Fourteenth Amendment, and that decision has had great influence ever since. In fact, the Fourteenth Amendment has been applied more often to Corporations than to the Freedmen for whom it was intended. From the beginning of the country corporations had been intended to be limited businesses chartered by the State for a specific purpose, but especially after this Supreme Court decision, that changed drastically. In the intervening 130 years, corporations have transformed to become the dominant social form in the United States, if not the World. This was certainly a major change in the rulers of the country, as signified by he transit of Uranus over the Midheaven of the United States, even if few have realized the immensity of the change. There are now some people agitating to overturn the Citizens United decision, but the cat was out of the bag long before that decision.
This is the chart set for the day the decision was handed down – May 10, 1886 – but the case was argued in January of that year and had wound its way to the Supreme Court, originally as three cases, over the preceding years.
The significance of the third transit of Uranus over the Midheaven of he United States will be immediately recognized by most people after the year of that transit is mentioned: 1968 (and 1969). There are probably more books with the year “1968” in their title than any other year, as many recognize it as a truly revolutionary year in the United States. At least many felt that way at the time. A brief mention of some events of those years will indicate the character: A second place result of Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire primary on January led to announcement by sitting president Lyndon Johnson that he would not seek another term in office in March. The assassination of Martin Luther King in April. The assassination of Robert Kennedy in June. A police riot around the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August. The election of Richard Nixon (who has been called the last liberal President by Noam Chomsky and also the last New Deal President) in November. 1968 was an election year in the US, and that always leads to more action and reaction. The next year saw the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival, which was made even bigger by the movie about it the next year in August; that festival followed closely the Moon landing in July. Also in August of that year a group of people directed by Charles Manson killed pregnant actress Sharon Tate (wife of director Roman Polanski) and others in her group in her house in Hollywood, creating a major uproar. Then there was the little noticed assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton by the FBI in December and the Altamont Speedway Music Festival that resulted in a stabbing that was often called “the end of the Sixties”, also in December.
After 1968 and 1969, the country had changed the Sixties had died, and the Seventies were all set to roll out. This third transit of Uranus had changed the United States for good, and people still recall those years, for better or worse.
This third chart is set for the first exact pass of Uranus over the MC in 1968. It also corresponds to the Sun at the Midheaven.