Kate Bush’s Uranus Transit

Aged just 18, triple-Leo Kate Bush wrote Wuthering Heights in one night and it became life-alteringly successful.

The surprise smash hit song was, she explained, inspired by seeing the Full Moon shining in a window right after she’d watched the 1939 film adaption of Wuthering Heights.

Leo solidarity cinched the inspo deal: Discovering her and Emily Bronte shared the same birthday – July 30 – she felt a zing of connection with the iconic Gothic novelist.

This particular evening – a Saturday night, March 5 1977 – was clearly quite the convergence. Yes it was teenage Leo heaven – an old romantic movie from the Golden Era of Hollywood, dramatic lighting from the Full Moon and history-crushing on an archetypal Leo talent.

But it was also an extraordinary astrological moment – cosmic lightning, a Magician at play. The Full Moon was at 15 Virgo, squaring Neptune in Saggo and shaking loose any limiting assumptions. But this was merely the backdrop: there was also a Saturn-Uranus square in play.

Saturn was in Leo and exact conjunct Bush’s natal Uranus. Saturn was also squaring Uranus in Scorpio, which was crossing her Ascendant at the time. I know it’s confusing but think of it like this: Kate Bush is a natal Sun-Uranus in Leo person with Scorpio Rising.

The general Saturn-Uranus square of 1977 directly influenced her natal Uranus and Ascendant. The alignment had been in effect on and off since 1975 but the earlier exact ‘hits’ saw Saturn conjunct her Leo Sun, squaring her Neptune in Scorpio/the 12th house.

The Saturn transit over her Sun* put paid to her already tenuous relationship with traditional education. School, she said “laid some really heavy inhibitions on me.” It also included an apparently unsuccessful debut performance and failing her driving test – Saturn 101.

Bush spent most 1975/1976 doing karate, learning interpretive dance, writing music and practicing piano. It all came together on the night of that Full Moon, with Uranus activating her Scorpio Ascendant.

She’s been a self-defined artist ever since – this New Yorker piece by Margaret Talbot is a brilliant summation of Kate Bush’s vocational voodoo:

One secret of Bush’s artistry is that she has never feared the ludicrous—she tries things that other musicians would be too careful or cool to go near. That was apparent from the very first lines of “Wuthering Heights”—“Out on the wiley, windy moors / we’d roll and fall in green / You had a temper like my jealousy / too hot, too greedy.”

When she wrote that song, she hadn’t yet read the Emily Brontë novel; she’d only caught the end of a TV adaptation. But of course she got the essence of the book, sucked it in, and transmogrified it in her teen-aged soul, and she knew how to keen those lyrics like a ghost ceaselessly yearning.

It’s interesting that a whole new generation has ‘discovered’ her as Saturn again squares Uranus, this time from Aquarius to Taurus. Transit-wise, this story is also a reminder that even the most ostensibly ‘hard’ aspects can generate major magic.

Thoughts?

*Her Sun-Uranus are in the 9th House – so she is also a classic 9th Houser. FYI, so was Emily Bronte – author of Wuthering Heights the novel. A Scorpio Rising and Leo like Kate, she had Sun, Mercury, Venus and Mars in the 9th.