Dharma over at Astrotabletalk has an interesting take on Neptune’s change of direction next week: Like me, Dharma is intently exploring the application of the new planet Eris and brings her into the equation as well:

Neptune is due to change direction in about a week. This means we can expect a new phase in the current Saturn-Neptune Opposition, which lasts for about a year, to begin. And the most obvious manifestation of this transit is the developing political realism around Iraq, which any decent mundane astrologer could have predicted a long time ago. [and many of us did]

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[T]he phase shift in a transit usually begins, I have noticed, in the run-up to a planet changing direction, and we have certainly seen this in the case of Neptune’s upcoming change of direction. The news has been full of politicians admitting to the need for policy change in Iraq. Neptune coming up to turn round has been like a bubble bursting. It began with a trickle, and now every day some senior official in either the US or UK governments is admitting to the need for change, and then another official will come along and deny it. They are obviously fudging their way to something more realistic, and doing their best to save face along the way, as you’d expect.

Even though it’s not being said, George Bush is obviously in the middle of a political disaster of the first order. But the acknowledgement of this belongs to a slightly later phase of the Saturn-Neptune Opposition. It’s the Iraq reality that is currently being acknowledged, and we can expect to see the momentum developing further over the next week as Neptune moves towards changing direction. The next phase-shift will be in early December, when Saturn changes direction: the run-up to this begins soon after the November mid-term elections. So I think we can fairly confidently predict that the phase after next will involve GWB getting his political come-uppance. Neptune changing direction (which it hasn’t quite yet) is proving to be about the bursting of illusion. Saturn changing direction could well be about GWB reaping the political consequences of his actions over Iraq.

And it seemed to be that Mars-Eris Opposition of a couple of weeks ago that catalysed the present momentum behind policy change. [This remember occurred the day of the nuclear test in North Korea.] Eris, the Goddess of Strife, is a newly-named ‘dwarf planet’. She was the one who mischievously threw an apple into a wedding feast and ended up occasioning the Trojan War. Eris can be seen as having the keyword ‘Catalyst’. The word catalyst comes originally from chemistry, where a small amount of one substance can make a chemical reaction occur much more easily and effectively, without that substance itself being changed by the reaction. The planet Uranus can also have a catalytic quality. What, I wondered, was going on when catalysts first came on the scene? The term was coined in 1835… at the end of an Eris-Uranus conjunction at 23/24 Aquarius!