Nuclear New Moon

Dear Friend and Reader:

It’s interesting how everyone uses American holidays to market their particular brand of megadeath. Over Thanksgiving, terrorists took over Mumbai, India. Over the winter holidays, Israel decided it was time for one last bashing-in of the Palestinians while Dick Cheney was still president. Now on Memorial Day we had news of North Korea testing a nuclear bomb.

In trying to assess how important of an event this is, we have a few options, and one of them is to use astrology. I would note, however, that in trying to assess our fears, we remember that we are the only country that has ever used a nuclear bomb on civilian populations: of Hiroshima, of Nagasaki and of the American southwest, during the major testing phase in the 1950s and early 1960s. The use of the bomb — in fact, more than 100 times — on American populations is covered in the photojournalism book American Ground Zero, published by MIT Press.

For those who live in the magnificent Four Corners region of the United States and are concerned about whether you’re getting lightly toasted by the lingering fallout from that program, I can tell you this. My friend Lane Andress is a geologist from New York who migrated to New Mexico, and she tells me that the radiation levels are currently not elevated above background levels, from the data she has seen. But we sickened many people in the process of testing the Bomb on them, and we dug ourselves deeper into our nuclear karma.

This weekend was the Gemini New Moon. Let’s take a look at where this fit something called the Nuclear Axis chart. (The chart links to an earlier article I’ve written about this issue.) The Nuclear Axis is a stretch of degrees across early Gemini and Sagittarius that seems to be sensitive to nuclear incidents. The chart is for the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction, in late 1942, created as part of the Manhattan Project. For those new to the conversation, the Manhattan Project was the secret American creation of the atomic bomb.

The sensitive degrees range from the very beginning of Gemini/Sagittarius (and thus Pisces and Virgo) to the middle of the mutable signs, where know that something called the Great Attractor exists (Venus is holding that degree in the Nuclear Axis chart). Sunday’s New Moon occurred right at the midpoint, in Gemini, of Uranus and Saturn — how very appropriate. As Barbara Hand Clow pointed out many years ago, the real nuclear issues is the damage to the integrity on our dimension or reality, where we’re not supposed to be splitting up the fundamental building block of matter, the atom.

Yet what is really interesting is that the South Node (past karma, history, strong tendencies, talents, protection from evil) in this chart is quite close to the ongoing triple conjunction of Jupiter, Chiron and Neptune. Indeed, that South Node is going to be taking transits from these planets all year and both Chiron and Neptune willВ  be hanging around well into 2010 or later.

So we’re going to be hearing from this issue for a while. But will we make the bigger connection? Nuclear war remains the single greatest threat to human civilization, and we created that threat ourselves. Humans have a funny, positively hysterical, way of blaming God, nature, cosmic forces and one another for what happens on the planet. Americans need to come to terms with the nuclear mess we created, and with the added responsibility that gives us to deal with the issue. So much astrology on the South Node suggests that we need to look to the past as relates to this issue. That the great conjunction is developing there is one sign that we have the ability to let go of the past, to see beyond it or to not be bound by it.

One thing I can say about my countrymen and women is that we like to look forward to the next thing rather than look at the past at all. You could say this is a fact of human nature, but I’ve traveled to and lived in enough Western countries to tell you that we are pretty special in the United States, in our infinite capacity to tear down history, ignore it, revise it or pretend that someone else did it. It would be encouraging to discover that we’re the ones who have the power to solve the problem, or to make that commitment, but I would love to know what we plan to do with our own nuclear arsenal.

This is not going to be a simple conversation, but to date it will count as the most important in the history of our particular civilization.

Yours & truly,