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The Hamburg School and Alfred Witte
Tropical zodiac, Uranian astrology (Hamburg School)
Uranian astrology is the way of reading a chart that comes from the "Hamburg School", which began with the work of Alfred Witte of Hamburg, Germany. It puts the weight on the distances between the factors of a chart and asks which factor stands halfway between which two. Many of its practitioners leave signs and houses out of the reading.
The Uranian side of this app is written from the articles Witte himself published in German astrology journals between 1913 and 1925, which are in the public domain.
What Witte proposed
Read in his own articles, four ideas stand out.
- Midpoints. The forces of two planets come together at the point halfway between them. When a third planet stands there, the three form one planetary picture.
- Personal points. The Aries Point, the Meridian and the Ascendant are used in the arithmetic on equal terms with the planets. The school later added the Sun, the Moon and the Node, which makes the six personal points the app uses.
- Solar arc. Every factor of the chart moves on by the distance the progressed Sun has travelled. It is used for the timing of a year.
- A turning disc. He advises drawing the chart on a disc of degrees and turning it, instead of working out each point by hand.
He also proposed hypothetical points beyond Neptune, which the app calls transneptunian points. Early in 1924 the journal's editors named the first four: Cupido, Hades, Zeus and Kronos.
The tone of the originals
Witte did not write a ready-made book of meanings. He says himself that the same point means something different in a public matter and in the chart of one person. In his article on Hades he calls his own remarks provisional, to be confirmed or contradicted by further research, and elsewhere he invites readers to try the method on events of their own lives that are already past.
His examples, on the other hand, are often heavy events in the lives of famous people, told with the confidence of his time. The app does not take that over. Its texts are newly written guides to interpretation that name no events in advance and promise no outcome.
The names "Hamburg School" and "Uranian"
The name of the school was in use while Witte was still writing. In 1925 the editors of the Astrologische Rundschau announced in a footnote a work called "Die Hamburger Astrologenschule" (the Hamburg school of astrologers), with explanatory articles by Fr. Sieggrün and W. Hartmann.
"Uranian" is the name English speakers later gave to the method. That is general background, not from the pages listed below.
In the app
Every Uranian page always uses the tropical zodiac. This matches what Witte wrote as early as 1919: what counts is not a planet's position against the fixed stars but its position measured from the Earth's axis. If you are new, read the article on the 90° dial next.
Sources
Articles by Alfred Witte. Page numbers are those printed in the journal.
- "Sensitive Punkte", Astrologische Rundschau, 1919, pages 23 and 28
- "Das Verhältnis der sensitiven Punkte zueinander", Astrologische Rundschau, 1921/1922, page 151
- "Der 4. Transneptun-Planet Kronos", Astrologische Rundschau, January 1924, page 93 (editors' note)
- "Das Planetenbild", Astrologische Blätter, April 1924, page 15
- "Die Differenzierung der Radixsonne und die des unteren Geburtsmeridians", Astrologische Rundschau, April 1924, pages 14 and 16
- "Der 2. Transneptun-Planet Hades", Astrologische Rundschau, June 1924, page 79
- "Direktionen und Planetenbilder", Astrologische Rundschau, May 1925, page 52 (footnotes by the editors and by the author)
The app's own conventions: all the wording of this article, the name "transneptunian points" for the hypothetical points, and leaving out Witte's example events.