With regard to material possessions of the nature of ready money, earned money and money acquired in business, Uranus may be considered fortunate or otherwise very much in accordance with the nature of the business. He is certainly bad for steady businesses, such as that of the grocer, or the baker, but for businesses which are gambling from first to last, like publishing, he may not be so bad. For the sudden vicissitudes which he brings are all in the day’s work if you are playing poker, and to win a jack-pot with four threes against an ace fully compensates for a hundred hand that were not worth drawing to. People with this position of Uranus go on making nothing for a long time, and then make a lot. Very likely they lose or spend it almost as soon as they get it. But in whatever straits they may find themselves, they never actually starve. Something always turns lip at the last moment. For people whose personality is conventional, this state of things will be extremely depressing; the artist’s temperament or the gambler’s temperament 01: the temperament of the religious man soon accommodates itself to the fact. We have four very striking examples of people with this position. Edward VII, until he became king, was in constant straits for money. He gambled desperately and put himself in the hands of the money lenders. It will be remembered that his difficulties even led him to accept invitations which one in his position should hardly’ have done. The Tranby Croft scandal and the Gordon Cumming trial which nearly wrecked the monarchical system in England may be regarded as directly due to this position.
Sir Richard Burton is another case in point. He made very large sums of money from time to time by the sale of his books. He netted twelve thousand pounds sterling straight off from The Arabian Nights alone, yet fortune constantly played traitor to him. He was another of those rich men who are always hard up. Stranger still is the case of Byron, who received thousands upon thousands of pounds from his publisher, ~Murray, yet who felt so bitterly the slings of poverty that he sent Murray a bible for a present with the sentence ‘Now Barabbas was a publisher‘, for ‘robber’.
The same story is true of Balzac, but with him he was always in actual extremity, ever on the point of being sold out, although receiving at frequent intervals sums almost beyond the dreams of avarice.
It is not necessary to describe Uranus as malefic to explain these facts. It is all part of the psychology of gambling. When you sit down and do a week’s work and receive a year’s income in return for it, it is only natural that you should feel wildly optimistic, and when for the next week’s work you only get six month’s income, you become unreasonably depressed, ‘Easy come, easy go’ too is a very good rule about money. It is only natural that one should value a little what one obtains without great effort. More than this, extravagance is definitely one of the Christian virtues. ‘Take no thought for the morrow’, said the Saviour; ‘consider the lilies how they grow’. ‘Arc ye not of more value than many sparrows.’ ‘Freely have ye received, freely give’. All direct incitements to un thrift.
Sometimes, however, these qualities are modified and appear rather as a tendency to adventure money in pursuance of a great idea; thus, Sir Isaac Pitman was constantly in the direst straits for cash, not because he failed to earn it, or because he squandered what he had, but because with him every interest was subordinated to that of establishing his system of shorthand.
Those people with this position who are engaged in business of an ordinary and conventional kind must be constantly on the watch for altenations of fortune. It is particularly when everything appears to be going well that disaster is likely to fall upon the native, and it will usually be from the most unexpected quarters. Every kind of insurance against this type of calamity should invariably be made.
When disaster has actually occurred, there is no occasion to be down-hearted. It is, as a rule, not best to attempt to meet the storm during its height. Wait for a lull and take the ball on the rebound. People with this position of Uranus very often have a strong premonition as to whether any business which they may undertake will turn out successfully. This is much more reliable than similar psychic faculties usually are, and it should be followed. Never put a business proposition before a man unless you can do so with a kind of interior confidence that he will agree. All those forms of business in which the element of chance most enters, are likely to suit the temperaments of the native. The scientific character of Uranus makes it probable that the exploitation of invention or the manufacture of chemicals or even the backing of research might prove fortunate. Similarly, the influence of Uranus upon governing bodies of various kinds makes it suitable for the native to link his financial fortunes with those of such corporations. There is a very unfortunate tendency to irregularity in Uranus, where that planet is set to rule things which depend entirely upon strict adherence to conventional order, such as book-keeping, where the quality of imagination is out of place. People with this position are probably quite incapable of calculating their weakly expenditure. Such things bore them by what appears their triviality.
To illustrate what we mean, a banker engaged in negotiating war loans might congratulate himself on having this position of Uranus, but he would be very unwise to engage a cashier whose horoscope was like his in that respect.
In life, it is always necessary to play the game according to the rule, but there are many games and in some of them the rules are that there are no rules. If you have Uranus in the second house, try and select one such game for your business.