If we situate Uranus in its proper planetary sequence, it is located after Saturn and prior to Neptune. From an archetypal perspective, we can view Uranus as an intermediary function between Saturn and Neptune. Saturn imposes the necessities of structure, organization, consolidation, discipline, and security upon individuals and the collective. Without it's function, very little–if anything–could be properly undertaken or achieved. However, the habits and ordering principles instilled by the Saturn archetype, as much as they facilitate proper functioning within established systems, can make us become too sedentary, too complacent, and too comatose to greater meaning, greater purpose, and greater knowledge that lies beyond the boundaries of cultural conditioning. It is Uranus's function, in all it's myriad forms, to rouse us from our cultural amnesia and myopia to help us recollect and remember what it is that we truly need on a deeper, more profound, and more satisfying level and to reveal to us the greater potentials of the human spirit.

In its less-evolved form, Uranus's proclivity to shock, to deceive, to aggravate and disrupt, and to mock tradition are all unconscious ways that this archetypal energy is trying to communicate the fundamental intuition that there is ‘something more' to life than what is inside the confines of societal convention. In a more highly-evolved form, the archetype of Uranus wakes us up to a divine intelligence which in no small way has been informing and guiding the entire evolution of the cosmos, from quark to human.

Thus, returning to Uranus's position between Saturn and Neptune, Uranus serves the purpose of awakening and liberating us from those shackles of societal constraint which prohibit the access and attunement of daimon (or soul), our personal uniqueness, divine recollection and insight, and perception of the world as continual synchronicity, in which our subjective awareness and the unfoldment of external reality are merely fractured segments emanating continuously from the same brilliant source. Uranus, then, is the psychopomp, trickster, and counsel which leads us to the truth of the Neptune archetype, in which divisions–all divisions–are ultimately illusory and that the universe is, in its essence, whole and has always been a state of wholeness from time immemorial.

Musically, this pattern of unfoldment–from Saturn, to Uranus, to Neptune–is given its most conscious and beautiful expression in Gustav Holst's The Planets. After the subdued calm and reserved pacing of the Saturn movement comes to a close, a series of four blasts from the brass section usher in the Uranus movement, surely to wake all dozing listeners lulled to sleep by Saturn's pondering gravity and inertness. With no consistent theme, but merely a series of constructed motifs which range from delightfully playful to ominously weighty, the Uranus movement musically conveys a state of agitated and frenetic experimentation, like the fluttering wings of a great mythological bird completely conscious of a steel cage which imprisons it and yet with little, if any, recourse for escape.