Fair enough. Serves me right for jumping to conclusions.

Ironically, you’re ahead of Gary and Funk on understanding what I’m doing here, perhaps because they are seasoned astrologers and are unaccustomed to doing simple exercises like observing cycles in history. It is a common pitfall for astrologers making the transition from reading nativities to looking at the daily world. The struggle becomes more about finding a single chart to interpret, and less about stepping back and looking at the story as more of a whole.

A lot of astrologers, schooled mostly in natal chart interpretation, tend to apply a lot of astrological detail to examine a single subject. My starting point is to look at a lot of historical detail with a single astrological factor, and work my out from there. I do have midpoints and asteroids in my arsenal, but they do not come into play when looking at matters this broadly. To me, doing so is like putting a microscope in front of a telescope lens.

Photography is actually a handy model to use in understanding this distinction. This article could be said to be taken with a wide angle lens, capturing the magnitude of an entire landscape, while the common standard is to use only a microscope.

As for “the moment the gavel is struck or when the proclamation is complete”, I see potential in both charts, and in Nick’s approach. Iran is a religious state which the 01 Feb chart shows really well. I haven’t spent too much time analyzing the 01 Apr chart but I am impressed with the transits. As Nick and Axel point out this in an ancient culture and we do have to see the current regime as a transitory thing. It is unstable wether using transiting Pluto on the MC in the 01 Feb chart, or transiting Uranus on Mars in the 01 April chart.

Now about Neda’s death, I’m all for using asteroids and midpoints too, but in the transits to the 01 Feb chart:

Pluto 02cap03 conjunct MC 02cap06,
Uranus 26pis35 square Venus 25sag28
Moon 29tau08 conjunct Fortunae 28tau51
AC 26sag24 conjunct Venus 25sag28
“women’s revolution”.

One thing that did stand out in the 01 Apr chart was the Vertex at 00cap53.

Sorry if any of you has read this before – it’s a horse I have often whipped.

the reason I did not use the angles of a chart as you mentioned is that I am not quite sure the exact historical moment of Khomeini’s return or proclamation, and even if I was (as is the case for Israel) -there remains the question: do you use the chart for the moment the gavel is struck or when the proclamation is complete?

So to answer your question, I am generally fishing in waters where Nick’s net (and mundane astrology principles) seems to show something ought to be and I am using two hooks -transits and eclipses to the 01 April chart.

Obviously it remains to be seen if I can get a big one to bite (via an accurate prediction), but it does seem that transits work particularly well with the 01 April chart because recently when Juno made her transit conjunction to Uranus June 19, 2009 (at the mid-point of 01 April natal Mars-Mercury) only a day later on June 20 we saw the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, an Iranian student shot during a protest. The video captured of this event soon went viral and helped to turn Neda into an International symbol of the civil unrest following the presidential election. This fits precisely with the function of the asteroids who, because they dwell between the personal and social planets, tend to make more personal the bigger social and collective forces.

It remains to be seen if eclipses have the same effect on this chart but we dont have long to wait. If nothing major happens until December then I may be inclined to examine the February chart more closely