Elsa was kindly put up a link to an article John Townley wrote about “When Uranus Meets Mars.”

A little less than every two years on average Mars conjoins Uranus, and when that combination of explosive force and targeted energy meet, often all hell breaks loose in the period surrounding. A good example is the conjunction of August 17, 1945–Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened just days before, and the first pictures of the Hiroshima blast went public that day. It happened to be my birthday–my mom used to tell me Japan surrendered as soon as they heard of my arrival–which may be why I have a fondness for it, despite its bad rep. . . .

What’s it all mean? Is it time to redecorate the panic room and the fallout shelter? Probably not, at least not for everybody, but there are some traditional places to look–to look to avoid, actually. That wonderful curmudgeon Al. H. Morrison once told me that where the exact Mars-Uranus conjunction rose and culminated would be the places on the globe that would be hot spots of wars, natural disasters, and general catastrophe for the next two years. Like so much of astrology, that seems to work more often than not, but sometimes misses the boat by a mile.

This intrigued me so I went to John and Susan’s Astrococktail site and found John’s updated article on the April-May ’07 Mars/Uranus events. It’s got lots of cool maps and illustrations so visit the whole article, but here is the gist of it:

Although most future forecasting is done by looking at the general swath of planetary aspects during a particular time period (like the scythe-type bucket chart of early 2007), or occasionally by looking at an individual nation’s transits and progressed chart (see: America Quo Vadis or Dark Days). Those are roughly parallel to normal, everyday transits and progressions, but on a grander scale.

Another approach is forecast by single events, such as the ingress of a year or a season as seen from a particular capital, or extremely rarely even a national solar return (a bit tricky, since that’s more like a human lunar return, because nations live on an expanded time scale, see: Adolescent Nation). It’s like a snapshot in the sky, from which you glean some kind of predictive information.

There’s a third, halfway approach, which is to do a chart for a major conjunction and find where in the world the conjunction is at the Midheaven, presumably making that the area where its manifestation will most be heard about in the following cycle. Outside of commonly-done local lunations, perhaps the most prominent example is the conjunction of Mars and Uranus, which happens roughly once every two years. Find where that occurs at the Midheaven, and you’ve got your finger on the location of the Mars-Uranus pulse (explosive events, violence, conflict) for the next two years. . . .

Another problem in using this to predict is not in having too much destruction to pinpoint, but not having big enough examples of it. The bigger the conflict, the more it seems to be on the mark. The Mars-Uranus conjunctions immediately previous to both WWI and WWII were directly over Europe, spot on. The one before the beginning of the latest war in Iraq didn’t really register at all, possibly because the invasion’s decisive rapidity wasn’t sufficiently destructive at the time, and its result is only just developing into something fiercer now, perhaps. The conjunction happens every two years, but major global conflicts and catastrophes don’t, so you can’t expect it to deliver in spades every time, thank goodness. We haven’t found an indicator that predicts size or intensity, and perhaps it lies somewhere in the rest of the chart. The usual common considerations don’t seem to tie in too well, however, like the sign or element it’s in. We’ve just had two in a row that were water-oriented, with the conjunction in water, but the air conjunctions of ’43 and ’45 brought both fire and water results. WWI was air, WWII earth, and there doesn’t seem to be a logical connection right off.

Testing the idea for the next round may be a little extra hard to do, because it paints its picture across the Middle East, from Afghanistan to Iraq, as the heart of the dire action to come. That’s a slam-dunk prediction, unfortunately. You don’t need an astrologer to tell you. The test, however – and the reassurance, if it works out that way – is hopefully that there is not some even bigger catastrophe lurking over the horizon somewhere else, in addition. Until the conjunction after that, anyway, over Western Europe and Africa, same as both World Wars…