Are Americans Headed for War in 2025?

Cycles of Uranus in U.S. history, Part 1

“For at the heart of the astrological perspective is the recognition that the planets appear to possess a cosmically based connection to specific archetypal forces or principles that influence human existence, and that the planetary patterns in the heavens bear a meaningful relation to corresponding archetypal patterns in human affairs.”

-Richard Tarnas

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up… a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-3, 8

A revolutionary discovery

In 1781, William Herschel stepped into his backyard (okay, British people, garden), and, while scrutinizing the constellation of Gemini, discovered the planet Uranus. This was the first reorientation in our understanding of the solar system since the Copernican reforms; Neptune followed in 1847 and Pluto in 1930 (though it was eventually downgraded to a minor planet).

The first detailed system of astrology was developed in Mesopotamia. Beginning in the 7th century BC (possibly the 8th), Babylonian astrologers were employed by the state to take note of all celestial events—movements of the planets, eclipses, solstices, meteors, and the like— as well as the weather, the price of commodities, river water levels, and any historical events of note. These details were meticulously recorded on clay tablets, and the project continued relatively uninterrupted through war and regime change for the next 700 years, finally ending in 63 AD. The basic system astrologers use today—the meanings of the planets, the division of the sky into 12 zodiacal signs, 12 houses, and ultimately, the notion of a horoscope—has its roots in what might be the largest, or at least the longest, science project ever conducted.¹

Fragment of the Babylonian Astrological Astronomical Diaries from the British Museum

Astrology still attracts some of the most thoroughly empirical and scholarly people around; many pursue classics degrees to read and translate ancient Greek, Mesopotamian, Arabic, and Latin texts; others obsessively compile databases of events, transits, and star charts, seeking, like their ancient ancestors, to understand the patterns written in the sky.

By the mid-20th century, astrologers were incorporating the newly discovered planets into their stable of symbols, building delineations based on a combination of the mythologies of their namesakes, the events surrounding their discovery, and the correlation of historical events with planetary transits. Uranus, its discovery bookended by the American and French revolutions, seems to have an obvious correlation with all that rebellious and innovative.

The Promethean planet

In the 1970’s, psychologists and psychedelic researchers Stanislaus Grof and Richard Tarnas found that the planets transiting sensitive points in a person’s birth chart seemed to have a significant predictive effect on the quality of their psychedelic experiences. Saturn and Pluto transits were associated with particularly difficult trips—feelings of constriction, visions of death—while transits from Jupiter and Uranus coincided with more positive and productive experiences. Uranus, particularly, portended major psychological revelations and creative breakthroughs.

In his essay Prometheus the Awakener, Tarnas explains that while the classical planets were named after their respective archetypal gods based on centuries of observation, the name of Uranus was more of a fluke resulting from a dispute. Herschel wanted to name the planet after England’s King George III, the French were not having it, and it took a German to settle the matter by plucking the name of a mythological figure out of thin air, one that has very little to do with the observed effects of the planet’s movements (Neptune and Pluto, being named by a French astronomer and British schoolgirl, respectively, seem to be a different matter).

Nevertheless, says Tarnas, the effects of Uranian transits have a decidedly Promethean flavor, associated with

“the principle of change, rebellion, freedom, liberation, reform, revolution, and the unexpected breakup of structures; with excitement, sudden surprises, lightninglike flashes of insight, revelations, and awakenings; and with intellectual brilliance, invention, creativity, originality, and individualism.”

It’s these positive aspects of Uranus that many pop astrologers like to focus on, assuming that all “progress” is beneficial and forgetting that stealing fire from the gods comes at a cost.  

Uranus: so individualistic and rebellious that it has to spin sideways instead of right-side up.

Uranus and U.S destiny

Uranus spends approximately 7 years in each zodiac sign, taking about 84 years to complete a full orbit. It was at the end of its transit through Gemini when Herschel discovered it, its arrival in the sign six years earlier coincided  with the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia; it backtracked briefly into Taurus at the end of the year before returning to Gemini in April 1775—just in time for the outbreak of war at the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

Astrologers commonly use July 4th, 1776, at about 5 pm or a little later to cast a “birth” chart for the U.S. (this is known as the Sibley chart), which puts Uranus at about 8-9 degrees of Gemini, along with Mars, a planet known for conflict and separations, at 21 degrees. What’s interesting about all of this is that every time Uranus returns to Gemini (again, approximately every 84 years), the U.S. has a major war that redefines its national identity. The first, of course, being the Revolutionary War and the birth of the nation. The next was the nation’s existential crisis in the Civil War, still the bloodiest war the U.S. has ever fought, with Uranus in Gemini from 1858-1866. The last time Uranus was in Gemini was 1941-1949, coinciding with the U.S.’ entry into World War II and its subsequent emergence as a world superpower.²

Anyone paying attention will quickly be able to see where this is headed. 1941 + 84 years = 2025. And  it’s not just astrological placements that predict conflict. Several historians and geopolitical analysts, using completely different methods for analyzing historical patterns, have arrived at the conclusion that the U.S. is ripe for a major conflict this decade. 

Is war a cyclical inevitability?

Eight years ago, I read a book that profoundly influenced my ability to look at crises from different angles: Peter Turchin’s Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. Turchin, an evolutionary biologist turned data-crunching historian, describes how conflict driven by Malthusian population crises provided the impetus for humans to develop highly cooperative forms of social organization. 

Turchin shot to fame at the same time I was reading Ultrasociety for another aspect of his work—his adoption of something called Structural-Demographic Theory to predict cycles of war and peace. In 2010, based on years of careful data collection and analysis, he predicted that the US was headed for a period of destabilization that would result in heightened conflict that would peak in the 2020’s. Nobody paid it much attention at the time—most political scientists were still feeling fairly optimistic about the continued spread of freedom, democracy, and capitalism. But by the summer of 2016, with the shocking results of the Brexit referendum and the increasing likelihood that Donald Trump would be the next US president, pundits and politicos began to sit up and take notice. 

Turchin isn’t the first to posit these grand cycles of history, though he probably has the most impressive data to back up his theories. He proposes roughly centuries-long cycles of waxing and waning political violence—give or take a few decades—punctuated by smaller 50-year cycles of spiking conflict. In the 1980’s, policy wonks William Strauss and Neil Howe proposed a theory of generational cycles which culminate in a “crisis” period every 80 years or so. They call this crisis “The Fourth Turning,” and Howe thinks it’s occurring this decade. The political scientist George Friedman recently proposed a theory of 80 year “institutional cycles” unique to the United States in which public trust in institutions falter and a war occurs, resulting in a re-ordering and redefinition of governing systems. He also sees separate 50 year socioeconomic cycles that result in resets in economic policy and social mores—think of the economic crises and the sexual revolution occurring in the 1970’s. This decade, for the first time, says Friedman, both cycles are coming to a head concurrently.

What does all this mean? And why am I bringing it up? I’m not a natural pessimist, nor a fearmonger, but if there is a strong likelihood of a coming U.S. War—not a crazy idea given our current levels of political polarization and the state of international affairs—I’m interested in the deeper existential questions it raises. 

If major national and world events are reflected in the sky, does that indicate there’s some kind of deeper meaning behind them? Can war—which, regardless of the merits or righteousness of one side over another, always results in the suffering and death of innocent people—ever be said to have some kind of purpose? If so, what does that say about the nature of any kind of divine intelligence? And most importantly, how do we respond? Is it possible to avert or mitigate war? I’ll consider these thoughts in parts 2 and 3.

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1. Interestingly, Herschel would undertake a similar project, correlating the cycles of sunspots and solar flares with weather patterns and the prices of commodities as recorded in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.

2. Nick Dagan Best, one of the nerdiest astrologers around when it comes to obsessively tracking transits to historical events, breaks it down on this episode of The Astrology Podcast