← Encyclopedia of Astrology · lesson 40/235
Outer planets
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What they are
The outer planets are Uranus, Neptune and Pluto — the bodies beyond Saturn that cannot be seen with the naked eye (Uranus, just, on a very dark night). They are also called the modern planets, the transpersonal planets, the trans-Saturnian planets or the generational planets. Each name picks out one fact about them: they were found only in modern times, they are read as forces larger than one person, they lie beyond the old boundary of Saturn, and they move so slowly that a whole generation shares their sign.
When they were found
- Uranus — identified as a planet by William Herschel in 1781.
- Neptune — first seen as a planet in 1846 by Johann Galle, at the place Urbain Le Verrier had calculated from Uranus's wandering orbit.
- Pluto — found by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930. In 2006 the International Astronomical Union reclassified it as a dwarf planet; astrologers have, almost to a person, kept using it.
Astrologers gave each a modern rulership: Uranus Aquarius, Neptune Pisces and Pluto Scorpio — signs that had belonged, and for traditional astrologers still belong, to Saturn, Jupiter and Mars.
How slowly they move
| Planet | Time round the zodiac | Time in a sign |
|---|---|---|
| Uranus | about 84 years | about 7 years |
| Neptune | about 165 years | about 14 years |
| Pluto | about 248 years | 12 to 31 years |
Pluto's stays vary so much because its orbit is strongly elongated. All three spend a large part of every year retrograde.
How they are read
Because everyone born within several years shares the outer planets' signs, most astrologers read the sign as a mark of the generation and look to the house and the aspects for what is personal. An outer planet tightly aspecting a luminary, a personal planet or an angle such as the Ascendant is read as a strong, individual theme.
- Uranus — change, awakening, independence, the sudden and the unconventional.
- Neptune — imagination, ideals, compassion, longing, and the blurring of boundaries for good or ill.
- Pluto — power, depth, crisis and renewal, what is buried and what is transformed.
In transit they mark the long movements of a life: a single outer-planet transit to a natal point can last a year or more as the planet stations back and forth over it. Life-cycle markers such as the Uranus opposition (around 40–42) and the Neptune square (around 41) are often read as part of the mid-life passage.
In mundane astrology their mutual cycles — the Uranus–Pluto conjunction of the mid-1960s, the Neptune–Pluto conjunction of 1891–92 — are among the main tools for reading the moods of eras, a line of work developed at length by Richard Tarnas.
Modern and traditional views
Modern psychological astrology made the outer planets central. Traditional astrologers differ: many leave them out of the essential dignities, rulerships and sect altogether (they were never part of those schemes), and use them only when they sit on a planet or an angle. Some modern writers have called them "modern malefics"; others reject that grading entirely. These are honest differences of method rather than settled questions.
In a reading here
When a transit reading weighs its days for ease and tension, a contact between two slow bodies — say transiting Neptune to natal Neptune — is counted at only about a third of its weight, because it is shared by everyone of that age and would otherwise drown out the faster contacts that set one day apart from the next.