Let us look closer at these different archetypal players individually, focusing on Pluto and Uranus. This time we will get a little help from Robert Hand who discusses Pluto and from Lawrence Hillman who discusses Uranus. Hand (2001) explains:
the nature of Pluto is similar to that of the Hindu god Shiva, the creator and destroyer. Pluto usually begins by breaking down a structure; then it creates a new one in its place. This entire cycle of death, destruction, and renovation is accompanied by tremendous powers, for Pluto is not a mild or even very subtle planetary influence . . . . Decay at one level or another followed by new life from the old is the typical Plutonian process . . . . Often a Pluto transit will signify the arrival of a person who transforms your life, either for good or evil. [emphasis added] Or it can symbolize an event or circumstance that has the same effect. Pluto also rules those energies inside you that lead inexorably to change. It rules the death and regeneration of the self, as old aspects of your life pass away and are replaced by new ones that could not otherwise have come into being. Pluto does not signify death in the literal sense; instead it refers to a metaphorical death, something that ceases to be . . . . It is extremely important that you recognize the inevitability of Plutonian change, which is built into the very structure of things and cannot be prevented. And you should not try to prevent it, because it is a necessary stage in your evolution. All that you will do is force the energies to build up until they are explosive. Then the inevitable changes come about disastrously. (p. 477)
As we will see in the movie, George Banks resists this kind of change and as a result, his career is almost jeopardized.
Here is Lawrence Hillman’s (1999, online) description of Uranus, which also is characteristic of Mary Poppins herself:
The planet of our time is Uranus. He is unpredictable, electric, magic, eccentric, bohemian, utopian, a breaker of traditions, futuristic, humanitarian, and rules the occult. He rules space exploration, satellite communication, computers, medical, scientific, and technological breakthroughs, and anything global, and anything belonging to groups. The concept of a digital universe, reducing music, pictures, and text to bits of electricity that are either “on” or “off,” . . . Uranus shakes up, rattles the status quo, and while a breath of fresh air to some, is a frightening reality to many. Uranus’s nature is to revolutionize, break up, and change whatever it touches. Uranian people make great inventors, communicators and often revolutionize the world that they inhabit. A great image of the Uranian/Aquarian principle is that of Ben Franklin standing in a storm with his kite in the sky and like Prometheus bringing light from the heavens to the people.
Tarnas, in Prometheus the Awakener (1995) relates that Uranus is regarded as signifying the individualist, the genius, and the rebel (pp. 11-12), he also explicates Uranus's trickster nature, and shows how this archetypal energy often serves to upset the established ego order of the psyche, in the service of the awakening of consciousness. This is exactly the dynamic that occurs in the movie between Mary Poppins [Uranus] and George Banks [Saturn]:
The transits of Uranus are notoriously unpredictable; and indeed this is the very nature of Prometheus the Trickster. For those who resist the Promethean energy, these transits act as intensely disturbing disruptions. They “make things crazy.” In such cases the individuals are psychologically siding with the other side of the Promethean gestalt: Zeus and the status quo (this is Zeus in his Saturnian aspect, as stern ruler and punisher—“ I am a jealous God). When the ego is so rigid that it fearfully resists all change, it will act like Zeus and be enraged, even panicked, by this unforeseen trickery of events, this unexpected challenge to his monolithic authority over the flow of life—over his own unconscious. (p. 108)
Thus Prometheus begins his task as the Trickster—by the little accident that disrupts the reign of the status quo, by the neurotic symptom that upsets the ego’s hold on things, by the bits of information that an orthodox scientific paradigm is uncomfortably unable to account for, and this Knight Errant, this Robin Hood in the eye of the establishment, completes his task as the Awakener, who serves as the initiator into archetypal awareness, the enlightener of his culture, and the vehicle of our liberation. (Tarnas, 1995, p. 114)