Uranus in Gate 23 – Splitting Apart

Gate 23 holds some interesting ideas for us in 2023. And with Uranus in Gate 23 for a year or so, those ideas will break upon us with a sense of the unexpected, despite how we’ve been thinking and talking about them for a long time now. That’s just how Uranus rolls!

The gate is call Splitting Apart, and also Falling Away and Peeling Off. The imagery in the hexagram is a mountain, solid and enduring, but in decline. It is crumbling back to earth. The general sense here is of discovering that something we expected to last forever is not, after all, a permanent thing.

We could think about this in terms of climate change, but I believe there is something more going on here, something that we can engage with, something that brings about hope for a better future.

To really understand this gate, you have to look at the hexagram.

You can see that the 5 bottom lines are broken yin and the top line is unbroken yang. One more push by the yin (feminine) and the revolution is complete! That last yang line is holding on for dear life! This is the last gasp of an insanely unbalanced culture that fetishes individuality, and ignores, even vilifies, the connections we all need to survive.

What’s it afraid of? Well, if the yin lines manage to break through, we get this:

This is the feminine polarity, the dark fecund void of creation that draws in the masculine polarity so that it’s active principle can operate from lived reality rather than abstract fantasy.

More here on Uranus in Gate 2 The Receptive

Uranus in Gate 23 – When Mutation Runs Dry

Gate 23 is part of the Individual Circuitry. It’s a Throat Gate, who’s voice is I KNOW. Well, that’s what it says when the mutative pulse is moving outwards. And we all like that part of the process. But what about when the pulse shifts to an inner mutation. What happens when all we have is – I DON”T KNOW! When we’ve exhausted all our ideas and we have to pause and reflect, maybe even develop some wisdom?

If we push on blindly beyond this point, what’s guiding us?

With Uranus in Gate 23, the things we have relied upon to make sense of our lives are all used up. All our assumptions seem worn out and useless. We have literally exhausted our individual mutative potential and it’s time to rest, recuperate, find where this is all going. The problem with that is, we have been conditioned to believe that we are only safe when we keep on moving. If we rest, the dark void will seek us out and all will be lost. Or at least, that’s how the story goes.

All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

If there is one thing you get from this post, let it be this. Yin is not inactive. Resting is not doing nothing. This is a process of reconnecting with source, and doing it in our own unique way. This is a time of learning how to really KNOW, and not just know what we’ve learned, what we’ve been told.

This is a time of knowing what action to take and when, because we can feel our part in the matrix of universal consciousness. And that requires us to embrace our inner mutation.

More on the Matrix of Brilliance

Typhon and Lempo

Our culture is largely based on the ancient Greek and Roman civilisations, both of which demonised the feminine – the dark, the void, the germinating. I mean, they literally turned these aspects of humanity into demons. We have all taken these ancient cultural influences in, allowing them to shape our sense of what it means to be human. This is not about discrimination or injustice. It goes so much deeper than that, into our beliefs about life itself.

With Uranus in Gate 23, two dwarf planets are at play. Typhon is in Gate 43 and Lempo is in Gate 23. These planets are both about recovering from our fear of the dark feminine, and in particular its creative and sexual power. We meet with it in that dark space where we find ourselves alone with our own thoughts and feelings. Where we are grasping for truth, something we can rely on. We are taught this apparently ‘unknowing’ place is shameful, lazy, selfish. But it’s none of those things. Instead, it’s powerfully creative. Its a birthing space for our unique creative contribution. It makes us ready for meeting our co-creative allies.

Typhon reminds us that these spaces are not ‘hell’ but our personal birthing spaces.

More on Typhon here.

Lempo was the Goddess of Sex – the Sacred Firewoman – but the Finnish christians found her confronting, and turned her into a God of Fire, along with a fresh new warning of the dangers of letting things get out of control. According to astrologer Kirsti Melto, the Finnish word lempi means love, and the original meaning was flame. Like Typhon, Lempo represents the suppression of the power of women’s sexual and creative energy. In its later incarnation, Lempo came to represent the churchman’s fear of being overcome by primal desire, and losing their loyalty to god and his laws.

Typhon and Lempo both carry the shadow fear of the uncivilised, the primal, the dark and so-called demonic. It’s this shadow, and the cultural baggage it holds, that we have to face within ourselves in this period of Uranus in Gate 23.

Dane Rudhyar describes Uranus as the planet of individual transfiguration, where we can personally become a focal point for the release of an aspect of Universal Mind. Uranus in Gate 23 brings this connection with Universal Mind. It comes from releasing our grip on what we think we know, and becoming conscious of the unique aspects of life each one of us is germinating. It requires us to let things fall away, split apart, peel off.

This is not an easy energy. Bradford Hatcher says it best in his I Ching:

The wise will learn to minimise what they hoard, redistribution will happen, but this can be voluntary and sent to where it does most good. The best wealth to carry also weighs the least.
When something is unsustainable, gravity will give an assist. Lasting perfection is no more important to nature than decay and death. But it’s only a bad situation for things as they are; it is good for things as they will be. We should move in that direction.

Bradford Hatcher, The Book Of Changes – http://www.hermetica.info/

I also like this gentler take from Carol K. Anthony:

We think we must arm ourselves against a situation that will be embarrassing, or perhaps lead to difficulties. We are afraid to allow matters to take their own course, and think we have to influence the situation through some kind of action or plan. To take preventative action is to split apart. Going with the flow allows the Creative to do its work.

Carol K Anthony, A Guide to the I Ching

You can see in Anthony’s version, that fear of being overcome by chaos, seeming as if we are not in control. The alarms raised when we realise – I don’t know!

A Quick Note on Chaos

Chaos has a bad rap in our culture. If you do an image search for chaos you get something that I would perhaps call disorder. To think of chaos as a loss of control is a telling indictment of our cultural fear of reality. What happens if people find out who we are when we lose control??

Uranus’ time in the Gate of Splitting Apart is a chaotic event. It reacquaints us with the true nature of chaos, and in doing so, rescues us from the insanity of trying to make life outside of any true relationship with reality. This is an experiment in who we become as individuals when we drop into the bedrock our potential and live from that place, only taking action when it feels correct.

By the time Uranus leaves Gate 23, Pluto will have shifted into Gate 41. There’s obviously a lot to say about this, but for now only one thing – we have to know what is no longer necessary, and how to release it. We have to be able to recognise what is alive and growing, and how to work with it. These are the skills for our time.

More on the Era of Individual Mutation: 2020 to 2025

Important Dates

The most significant transit events for Uranus in Gate 23 are:

• 13 November 2023 – New Moon in the Channel of Structuring (23-43). You can view the Taraka.io chart here.
• 8 April 2024 – Jupiter will be in Gate 23 and the two planets will be in line 4 together on 20 April 2024.