I cannot believe I even have to spend my Thursday evening writing about this. Or my days thinking about it, for that matter. But, alas, I cannot seem to check my e-mail or any of the news sites without reading about it. I guess it's better that we're not being kept in the dark about it. And you have to admit, it's all pretty suspenseful and awfully exciting wondering whether our species will survive the Cheney/Bush administration, even after Ronnie Reagan rode in on his white horse and personally saw to the downfall of the Evil Empire.

I just finished an Instant Message session with an unidentified elder male relative, who grew up during the Cold War doing duck and cover drills as a kid, that went a little like this (after I pointed out the inconvenient fact that Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz were involved in setting up a plutonium program in Iran in the 1970s, under the Ford administration):

Unidentified Elder Male Relative: So do you want me to believe that just because the names stay the same, the positions and alliances do, too?

Me: It's very lowbrow politics. These guys are arms traders.

UEMR: Maybe, but the one problem with the critics is that they never have any solutions.

Me: But this isn't really a problem. It's a manufactured crisis. And this is THE classic way to manipulate people, you quickly make an "us" and a "them" and it's a done deal.

UEMR: Tell me some solutions.

Me: To what?

UEMR: Reducing the threat of terror in the US and around the world, or should we all become Muslim extremists?

Me: Iran is a country that can't even manage to get nuclear power online, and I can tell you that a solution is NOT bombing the Islamic world. This is how you make the problem worse.

UEMR: It didn't in Japan.

So much for seeking ethical guidance and wisdom from our elders caught in The Spell. No, using nukes didn't make the problem worse in Japan. Unless you happened to be in Hiroshima that day. Then it made your problem a lot worse, if you even had one. I used to have discussions with my unidentified elder male relative like this when I was five years old. This is why we're both so good at it. We've been practicing since back in the days of Vietnam.

So where else do we go for some guidance? If we look to astrology, there are at least three charts to consider. One is the chart for the Islamic Republic of Iran, from April Fool's Day 1979. The second is a chart called the Nuclear Axis, which is the first time a self-sustaining atomic reaction was created in 1942, under the Manhattan Project. The third is the chart for Hiroshima a few years later.

In reporting on these charts, I don't mean to harsh anybody's mellow, or interfere with the gradually rising tide of optimism that something good is going to come out of all this insanity that we're seeing. I'm not here to get in God's way, to trip Jesus, or draw a picture of Mohammed. Personally, I'm not allowing that to bias my interpretations. Nor am I predicting disaster.

I'm just saying slippery when wet, and caution: Don't stop on the tracks. Putting up a railroad crossing sign is not a prediction that somebody's going to wipe out at the intersection. To the contrary. And there are quite a few trains going by these days. Here is what the charts say to me.

The Iran chart is slightly disturbing, but mostly because it's confused about some fundamental values and seeks to impose that confusion on other charts.

At first it looks innocent enough, with lots of sweet friendly Pisces, until you notice that there are six planets in the 8th house—the house of death. Say the word 'death' six times and then think of Iran and you'll have a feeling for its chart. So many planets stuffed into the frightening, scary old 8th house, which is a relationship house where we strive to share our values, can make you a little obsessive in that department. It is also the house of sex, and can surely make you obsessive about that as well. Where Iran is concerned, it would seem that death gets higher official approval ratings than sex. You can be executed there for suspicion of being gay. But then, there are places in the United States this has also proven to be true in recent memory.

Tucked into that 8th house is a conjunction of Mercury retrograde conjunct Mars. That is backwards rhetoric that should remind us all of the 14th century or so. Mars in Pisces seeks pleasure and creative expression. Mercury retrograde pretty much makes that a real struggle. The conjunction is square Neptune in Sagittarius. Slippery when wet.

It turns out that the Nuclear Axis chart and the Iran chart have a lot in common, specifically, many planets placed early in the mutable signs (Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, and Pisces). When these planets come under transit, that is, when the planets where they are now align with the planets back then, the nuclear issue comes up, and it does so dependably. Extremely dependably. Usually there is an accident or a crisis of some kind. Chernobyl is a most unfortunate example, but they haven't all gone so badly. For example, the June 2000 fire at the Hanford nuclear facility in Washington was a miracle, and a warning.

As fate would have it, Uranus and Pluto are currently dancing around the mutable signs (Pisces and Sagittarius, respectively), stirring up both the Iran chart and the Nuclear Axis chart. These are the planets for which uranium and plutonium were named.

Uranus is currently tromping all over that array of Pisces planets in the Iran chart's 8th house. Uranus is always full of surprises, which tend to appear quickly. Often they are solutions or technological breakthroughs, and other times they are simply the unexpected. Pluto, the planet of obsession, is in Sagittarius, the sign of religious fervor, and it's been making a lot of squares to Iran's 8th house, and also making a lot of aspects in the Nuclear Axis chart the past few years.

So, astrologically, we have something of a setup, at the very least, for the kind of rhetoric we're now seeing: Iran proud that it's made enough uranium to light up one of those little green glow sticks; and Washington proud that it has yet another evil country to save us all from. Both leaders are seeing this as the perfect opportunity to dazzle us out of noticing their idiotic choices and low public approval ratings.

At the moment, Pluto is squaring both Mars and Mercury in Iran's 8th house, which in part accounts for their apparent death wish. But it's largely a head trip. It also accounts for all the talk, talk, talk—Mercury is involved, and you tend to talk about the Mercury aspects you have going on. And Uranus is basically provoking the Iranian government to be extremely petulant and "independent" and not let anybody boss it around, kind of like a healthy 15-year-old, only this is a grownup country with a lot of guns and rockets.

The planet that reveals the prevailing psychology of the moment is Ixion, which is in Sagittarius. You've never heard of this planet, about as distant as Pluto and somewhat smaller, unless you have really strange reading habits (such as visiting PlanetWaves.net), but it is a real planet discovered in 2001, and it was named for the first murderer in Greek mythical history. Ixion was brought to Olympus by Jupiter, for rehabilitation, where he hatched a plot to rape Hera, the Queen of Heaven. Ixion had problems, and astrologically, I give this new planet the keywords, "that which we are all capable of."

Ixion getting mixed up in the Nuclear Axis chart has been bugging me for a while, because this is anything but a rational influence. Ixion thinks like a perpetrator, but also reveals that quality of thought. It reveals something of the common thread that runs through the human psyche's long shadow. In a sense, it does not matter who is wrong or right where Ixion is concerned; the subject matter arises, and we can all become accomplices, just as Zeus was the unwitting accomplice in the attempted rape of his wife (she outwitted the little brat, however).

Ixion in this position would be about thinking the unthinkable, and assuming that people are capable of the undoable—that's exactly the page we're on. And whether we are actually risking a nuclear volley with Iran (or rather at Iran, since they can only retaliate with glow in the dark stickers at this point), we're going to see more and more of the twisted psychology emerge that would underlie such a stupid possibility. In a sense, it's a kind of purge that we're seeing this kind of thinking come to the surface of consciousness rather than stay stuffed down. Once it comes up, we have a choice. Until then, it remains hidden and we have no choice.

Then there is the Hiroshima chart. As you would expect, this is not a particularly pleasant chart. It drips with weight and karma. We need to think about Hiroshima every time we consider the existence of nuclear weapons. When you bring the chart up to date using a dependable method called "secondary progression," you find out that we're going through the eye of the nuclear needle. We're at the end of a long cycle in this chart's history, spanning about 30 years during which the world was in fact gradually becoming somewhat safer, from the standpoint of nuclear war, and during which time the Cold War ended (the chart is having a New Moon by secondary progression).

The end of a long cycle like this does not portend a disaster, but it does raise the issue: What are we really doing at the turning point? What plans are we making for the next cycle? This is the moment of seeding, the nuclear dark of the Moon. Are we sowing the seeds of nuclear war or nuclear peace for the next generation? What will our kids be saying to us in the Instant Message sessions of the future? We are choosing, and we're choosing now.