Here is the scenario. In March 2003, the slow-moving planet Uranus made its way into Pisces for the first time since the (roaring or spiritually bereft, depending on who you ask) 1920s. This is such big news that anyone remotely following astrology is aware that it's happened. Transits of Uranus through any sign are deeply influential in helping define an era, and this one continues for the next seven years. How much can this change the world? Well, consider that at the beginning of the Uranus in Aquarius era, the Internet was something that some people had heard of. Now it's something that just about everyone in Western culture depends on every day.

In Pisces, the Uranian shift will be much more internal, like a vast Internet opening up inside us and among us. How is that for a vision? Please, hold the spam. I don't need Magic Mala or Lifetime Yoga Mat ads coming in while I'm meditating. Those of us working on spiritual paths know that all minds are joined all the time. Uranus in Pisces is going to do quite a lot to revolutionize that. Pisces, when expressed on shall we say the lower levels of its potential, also has a lot to do with anything beginning with a D (my teacher David told me this): drugs, drink, delusion, denial, defensiveness and dependency. America has been saying no to drugs for 20 years, and meanwhile, just about everyone has been taking more and more drugs (predominantly antidepressants, but I doubt [another good Pisces word] that any category of drug sales has gone down in 20 years). Sounds like denial.

Uranus has the power to shock us out of that haze. Some say this planet should have been named for Prometheus, since all the metaphors we call "Uranian" are actually Promethian: sudden flashes of insight, revolution, playing with the divine fire, profound foresight, inventiveness, and an utterly rebellious spirit, even against the gods themselves. This is frightening energy for most people. If religion (as Jung suggested) is the substitute for religious experience, then all things Uranian are one big reason why religion is so popular. It's entirely predictable. It's safe. It's easy. And usually quite boring.

Pisces is about the imagination, inspiration, art, music and the deepest levels of erotic expression (that's why we need all those drugs -- to tune out the best reasons we came to play on Earth). Now let's add another factor to the brew, the serious touch, the guardrail and the near-guarantee that we're going to get some results as a result of all this. In June 2003, Saturn migrated into Cancer, another water sign (all the signs of one element work closely together like one energy field). So, after quite a few years of having no slow-moving planets in the watery signs, we're now experiencing some major events that will potentially do something exceedingly rare in the age of free-floating information packets: ground us in our emotions.

Looked at another way, Saturn in Cancer will help us ground the burning visions of Pisces in something real, in a structured reality, like a business, a gallery, a studio, a workshop or a project with a distinct goal. If there is one key to success, the stars say it's experimentation. I was going to say innovation, but the two are very closely related. To experiment means to be guided by experience. That opens the way to originality. It also opens the way to the unexpected, and the unexpected is just what's coming. If you know Uranus, you know this planet never lets you down.

The now-ended Uranian-Aquarian era came in with computers plugging into the wall and went out with them plugging into network routers and cable modems: the Internet appeared as a consumer product like a mushroom. The 'net has the distinction of being the first two-way medium besides short wave radio. And it appeared suddenly and took over in a few years, seemingly out of nowhere.

Toward the end of the prior Uranian era, when the planet of disruption and innovation was crashing through Capricorn -- the sign of structure, government and the past -- the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall and the USSR all wound up in souvenir shops. This is one serious planet. (Admittedly, Uranus had a little help from Neptune in that rather impressive rearrangement of world empires).

So we well might wonder: what exactly happens next?

It's unlikely that any living astrologer remembers what it felt like to actually experience Uranus in Pisces, though a few may still be around who have this placement in their natal charts. A lot has changed since 1919. Sneakers now come with flashing red lights, but a dog is still a dog.

Still, a look at the history of the 1920s may help us taste the energy of that era. We don't always think of the 1920s as being an especially compelling time in history. The Great Depression and Hiroshima and Cold War that followed warp our view of spacetime and make it seem like a quaint moment, when flappers -- those stylish, brash, hedonistic young women with short skirts and shorter hair -- thumbed their noses at society's conventions, when gangsters ruled Chicago, and when jazz led directly to sex. They tell me a lot of marijuana was smoked. America was rising in an economic boom. More disposable income was available for the average working person.

But there is a lot more to the picture. Within what now feels like hours of the first Pisces ingress, women get the right to vote, prohibition was enacted, there was a shocking Red Scare, and Republican Warren G. Harding won the presidential election of 1920 in a landslide. Harding, unlike his predecessor Woodrow Wilson, was a firm believer in isolationism. Congress refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and America opted out of the League of Nations that Wilson had been instrumental in setting up. Legislation was passed to control the unions and prevent strikes, the courts tended to support employers over employees, taxes for the rich were slashed. This was the era in which business first took the lead from government as the chief instrument of society.

In 1919, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were charged with a murder they had not committed, in one of many frantic moments of the United States becoming terrified of outsiders. A bomb had exploded in front of the attorney general's home; he responded with raids and secret detentions of foreign nationals. Their trial stretched on for seven years, and was known around the world. The two were executed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in August 1927. "If it had not been for these things," Sacco said just before his death, "I might live out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died, unmourned, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we have to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of man as now we do by accident."

Through the '20s, there was the rise and heyday of the KKK, the Ku Klux Klan, a secret order that's now associated with anti-black racism in the south. In those days, their main targets were Catholics. They pretty much ran the state of Indiana. There are still secret clusters of them all over the place.

Howard Carter, on Nov. 4, 1922, pried open King Tut's tomb, unleashing a weird spate of deaths among the archeologists involved in the expedition, and unleashing a rage of Egyptomania, in which Egyptian motifs became fashionable in clothing and decorating.

This was the era of Aleister Crowley, Edmund Arthur Waite and the Golden Dawn. There was an early version of the New Age movement raging in the pseudo-intellectual upper crust. Theosophical writer Alice A. Bailey publishes The Consciousness of the Atom in 1922. In 1925, Dr. Mark Edmund Jones and a clairvoyant named Elsie Wheeler record the Sabian Symbols, now one of the most famous symbolic references in all of modern astrology. The practice of something called Spiritualism was at its peak, with things going bump in the night and tables levitating. At the other end of the spectrum, psychoanalysis was becoming entrenched as a dominant framework among the educated for understanding the supposed inner nature of the mind.

There was another famous clash between rationalism and seeming mysticism: the perfectly outrageous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, in which a Tennessee school teacher was charged with violating a law against offering students "any theory that denies the story of divine creation as taught by the Bible and to teach instead that man was descended from a lower order of animals."

A few years later, Charles Lindburgh got in his airplane and flew across the Atlantic, one of many aviation adventures and misadventures of that era.

Radio was fast becoming something: for the first time, households were connected by a live, instantaneous broadcast medium, which brought us a long way from when news of the Lincoln assassination took two weeks to reach some parts of the country. RCA created NBC, with its Red and Blue networks. Blue was eventually spun off as ABC, the first spin-off in media history. There were phonograph records, too. People had the sense that they were living in an important time in history.

In science, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Satuendra Nath Mose and others were penetrating the layers of physical and energetic reality, slugging out the nature of light and energy and smashing atoms on paper. In 1920, Einstein publishes the General Theory of Relativity. "The gravitational field has only a relative existence," Einstein commented, "Because for an observer freely falling from the roof of a house -- at least in his immediate surroundings -- there exists no gravitational field."

Divergences between the theories of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics were being explored at a rather feverish pace. In 1921, Einstein won the Nobel Prize for physics for his work with the photoelectric effect, which would lead to television; by the end of the decade, the first television broadcast would occur -- a quiz show, of all things. In this era, the neutron is discovered and the notion of causality, a foundation of traditional physics, is losing its grip on reality. The implications of this are still sinking in 80 years later.

In literature, there was the Lost Generation of writers, including Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Parker and the woman who named them, Gertrude Stein. But the writing of this era seems to have begun with what turned out to be among the most prophetic lines in modern literature, from The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, published in 1922:

Film made extremely impressive advances, and the decade was crowned by the 1926 release of Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang. This was the first full-length science fiction film, 90 minutes of silent dystopia. The film is set in a world where a rich elite thrive in an above ground city, and where masses of drones work below the Earth to keep the city in working order. Residents of the underground city are bound to and ruled by their machines.

We don't have to look far to see the Piscean themes wherein the revolutionary energy of Uranus is at work in the mystical and philosophical realms -- expressing itself in part as science, in part as ideological debate, and in part as social regression or progress. The nature of reality is itself at stake; questions of faith are at the forefront; technology is advancing in shocking ways that both penetrate the mysteries of physical existence and bring the world much closer together; and the most prominent writers of that era are questioning the meaning of what they are seeing and feeling.

If we look at the few Uranian eras described in this article -- the Pisces era of the 1920s, which saw major advances in transportation, broadcasting, physics, women's rights and spiritual issues; the Capricorn era of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the time in which Communism fell; and the Aquarius era of the mid 1990s to early 2000s, in which the Internet was created, we can glimpse a pattern that astrologers have long acknowledged.

Given that Pisces is one of the most visionary signs, and Uranus is the planet of invention, it would be a really good idea to envision what we want for ourselves and for our communities as this energy approaches -- not predict what's going to happen. ++