Wizard's Weekly Wrap-Up: The Holy Wars of a Wounded World
The Middle East Burns, the World Bleeds and the Blood Moon Demands a Reckoning: The Week That Was March 1-7, 2026
This week, the fire found its name, as revelation became a reckoning, and the wound - long festering beneath the skin of the world - tore itself open under the crimson sky.
While Trump hosted a multi-million dollar fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, the United States and Israel launched large-scale coordinated military strikes on Iran - dubbed "Operation Epic Fury" by the administration, and "Operation Epstein Fury" by critics who called the attacks a distraction from the fact the president's name appears thousands of times in the recently released Epstein files, alongside a newly released DOJ disclosure detailing an allegation that Trump raped a thirteen-year-old girl - allegations the FBI deemed credible enough to interview the girl four times.
The strikes in the Middle East have killed hundreds so far, including over 100 girls from an Iranian school, 6 U.S. service members, and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who ruled Iran with an iron fist for more than forty years. Iran retaliated with strikes against Israel and against U.S. bases across Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Hezbollah joined in from Lebanon. Israel hit the suburbs of Beirut. Global markets tanked and oil prices spiked as traffic through the Strait of Hormuz - through which 20% of the world's oil passes - dropped almost to a halt.
Hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals found themselves stranded across the region, including up to a million Americans, who the U.S. State Department urged to leave but said it could not help. With airports and airspaces closed, exactly how they're supposed to do that remains unclear.
At first, Trump's justifications for the strikes was nuclear weapons, but when U.S. intelligence assessed Iran posed no mainland threat for at least a decade, it suddenly became regime change. "All I want is freedom for the people," he told reporters - which landed somewhat awkwardly given that the strikes had, by his own admission, killed most of the candidates he'd identified to lead said free people. An intelligence report representing all 18 U.S. agencies concluded that even a large-scale assault was unlikely to topple Iran's entrenched leadership. So-called regime change war going well it seems.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio eventually admitted that the U.S. struck first because Israel was going to anyway, and Iranian retaliation against U.S. forces was inevitable. Netanyahu confirmed it warmly, saying the coalition "allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years."
Meanwhile, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard confirmed its forces remain fully operational and Iraq’s Islamic Resistance militia warned that any foreign entities intervening in the region - including NATO, France, Germany, and Britain - would be considered legitimate targets. Iran’s national security official Ali Larijani vowed Tehran would hold Trump personally responsible for the attacks and would not rest until it had retaliated in kind. Iranian President Pezeshkian offered the only off-ramp in sight: Iran would stop launching missiles if neighbouring countries stopped initiating attacks. Trump’s response was to demand unconditional surrender.
The allies were not impressed. British PM Keir Starmer said Trump had plunged the Middle East into chaos - Trump shot back that the relationship was “not what it was” and accused Starmer of being unhelpful, while the UK quietly held the line: British bases for defensive use only, no broader participation. Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez was blunter, saying Spain would not support the war effort and would not act out of fear of reprisals - the conflict was “bad for the world.” Canadian PM Mark Carney called it a “failure of the international order,” noting the strikes were carried out without UN engagement or consultation with allies. The world, in other words, was not on board.
Back home, Trump's MAGA base - who backed his "no new wars" election pledge - were even less enthusiastic. Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Alex Jones, Nick Fuentes and Marjorie Taylor Greene all denounced the strikes that are reportedly costing U.S. taxpayers more than $1 billion a day, with 50,000 troops now assigned to the conflict, and Trump openly mulling putting boots on the ground.
Still, Senate Republicans voted down a war powers resolution that would have reined it all in as news emerged that Russia is now providing Iran with satellite intelligence on U.S. troop locations and China is preparing to supply financial assistance and missile components. Iran's Revolutionary Guard warned the "gates of hell" would open increasingly, while U.S. officials quietly admitted Iran's Shahed drones are harder to intercept than expected. That’s code for Iran’s kabooms may be going better than America’s.
As threats of retaliation on US soil increase, news emerged that FBI Director Kash Patel fired members of the elite CI-12 counterespionage unit - the agents with specialised expertise in Iran and foreign intelligence threats - just days before the operation began. Reports also emerged that military commanders have been telling troops the war is "all part of God's divine plan," that "President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon," and that commanders displayed “unrestricted euphoria” over how “bloody all of this must become” to fulfill fundamentalist Christian “End Times” prophecy with a "biblically-sanctioned war." So, apparently, this is now a holy war. Anyone else need a lie down?
Sadly, the rest of the week didn't offer much in the way of recovery. The February jobs report showed 92,000 jobs cut in the US - significantly worse than forecast. The Wall Street Journal reported 47,635 files are missing from the publicly released Epstein files, with Representative Ro Khanna saying roughly half of the files - millions of pages - remain unreleased or heavily redacted, and that the “worst stuff” may still be hidden. The Republican-led House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi to testify under oath about the DOJ's handling of the files. Khanna believes around 20 Republicans may support holding Bondi in contempt if she fails to release more Epstein-related files, adding that he thinks “she’s in trouble.”
Speaking of trouble, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was fired this week after a catastrophic congressional testimony on her corruption and lawlessness in office; Illinois Governor Pritzker sent her off with a video, saying “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Here’s your legacy: corruption and chaos. Parents and children tear-gassed. Moms and nurses, U.S. citizens getting shot in the face. Now that you’re gone, don’t think you get to just walk away. I guarantee you, you will still be held accountable.” Senator Ron Wyden was more direct, posting “Turns out lawlessness is not a winning strategy. See you at Nuremberg 2.0.”
A sign of change on the horizon, Democrats have now outperformed their 2024 presidential results by an average of 13 points across more than 90 races since Trump took office, including flipping an Arkansas state house seat this week and a massive Democratic turnout that saw James Talarico win the Texas Senate primary.
And, since everyone else seems to be crashing out, actor Timothee Chalamet went down in a blaze of glory this week and potentially kissed his Oscar hopes good bye, insulting ballet dancers and opera singers everywhere with an interview that criticised the traditional art forms. The response was swift and ruthless.
All of this week’s insanity played out under the crimson light of a Blood Moon - the Virgo lunar eclipse that causes old information to be seen in a new context. Documents people already had but didn't understand. Names sitting in plain sight across millions of pages, suddenly finding each other. And then the one that stopped the room: a credible allegation, suppressed by the DOJ, that the sitting president of the United States raped a child. As the walls close in, the Iran war looks more and more like a man setting fire to the room to stop us reading what’s on the table.
The reckoning is here, even though the reveal is still unfolding, and what’s coming next is not a swift return to calm. The sky is about to enter a passage that will make everything we’ve lived through so far this year feel like the warm-up act, unlike anything most of us have walked through in our lifetimes. But this is not the end of the world - it’s just the death throes of a dying age, as we prepare to enter something entirely new.
If you’re frightened by what’s happening right now - if you can’t sleep at night for fear of what might come next - you won’t find solace in the news or by doom scrolling social media. Today’s news makes more sense when we understand where this fire first started, and to do that we must look back to where the wound was first cut, because you can't read a scar without knowing what made it.
Let’s sift through the clatter of this current chaos and look back to see what’s hidden in history, what’s written in the sky and what’s humming beneath the ground, to better understand what’s behind this “holy war” and what’s up ahead. Take a deep breath and let’s wade through the noise. Let's cross the bridge from here to there, together.
**The cosmic insights shared here are mapped to the real movements of the heavens during the past week. If you want to know more about planetary pattern recognition, read about it here**
The Walking Wounded
Life is not shaped by the good times.
The good times are the brief stretches of straight road we get between the crossroads - those intersections that ask us to choose who we wish to become. Some of us, walking forward in genuine alignment, manage to sail through them relatively unscathed, but most of us meet the crossroads like a traffic accident, ploughing through the intersection and ending up wrapped around a telegraph pole, battered and bruised, staring at the wreckage, wondering what just happened.
The crossroads often wound us, and the choice that follows, as we pick ourselves up and forge ahead, is the one that will shape everything that comes after. Do we take the path of the wound, and slowly, steadily, become it? Or do we heal?
In astrology, these crossroads are called transits. When one planet in our chart makes a sharp angle with another, it creates a narrow, precise passage for us to move through, with walls close enough on either side to feel them. Just wide enough for our being, but no wider, and with no room for extra baggage.
If we release what we’ve been carrying, then we move through cleanly - changed but intact - but if we try to pass through still clutching the old wounds, the old stories, and the old grievances we have refused to put down, then the transit scrapes us. The sharp edges of the passage carve into us as we move through and we emerge on the other side bleeding, marked, and raw, presented yet again with a choice - do we heal, or keep clinging to the wound and carrying it forward into the next transit, which will be narrower still and cut all the more deeply?
Crossroads are about whether we arrive carrying everything we have ever been hurt by, or whether we have learned, finally, what to put down. This is the central question of every human life - not what happened to us, but what we did with what happened to us - and it turns out it is equally true for nations as well.
Nations carry wounds the way people do, and they face the same choice at each transit between becoming the wound or healing. When a nation chooses to become its wound, it passes that choice down through generations. When a nation chooses the wall, the fortress, the enemy, or the story of righteous us against evil them, that baggage is inherited by its people, leaving them to drag generational wounding that is both unbearably heavy and with no clear origin. The wound remains though the memory of where it came from passed long ago. The people are wounded, but they hardly know why.
Right now, as we watch bombs fly all over the Middle East, what we are really watching is the world navigating an impossibly tight transit - the kind that arrives when healing is no longer optional. The kind that shows up after decades of transits that offered the option of healing but the opportunity was ignored, so now the sky is removing the option entirely, forcing us to pass through this portal without the baggage, and to set down what we have been carrying too long.
Many are calling this World War III, but the stars scoff at the notion. This isn’t a world war, though it feels like it. This is a world wound, and healing is no longer optional. We will heal as we pass through this passage, or we will not pass through at all.
The Wound Beneath All Wounds
The wound of our modern world has its roots in the ancient world, in a time when the Middle East was home to two of history's great civilisations - the Kingdom of Israel, and the Persian Empire to its east. These were not distant or hostile neighbours - in fact it was the Persian leader Cyrus the great who liberated the Jewish people from Babylonian captivity and allowed them to return home in 539 BCE, earning himself the title of messiah in Jewish scripture. Persia exists today as the modern nation of Iran - the country being bombed by Israel right now in 2026 is the one that freed the Jewish people two and a half thousand years ago.
Our modern world’s wound can be traced almost that far back, to 70 CE when the Roman Empire dismantled the Kingdom of Israel, destroying Jerusalem, demolishing the Temple, and dispersing the Jewish population in what is called the diaspora; two millennia of a people carrying the wound of displacement through every country that would briefly tolerate them before expelling them again, while the land that had originally been known as the Kingdom of Israel passed through the hands of successive empires, each leaving their mark upon it.
By the time the 20th century rolled around - after centuries of being inhabited and governed by Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders and Ottomans - the land the ancient world once knew as the Kingdom of Israel was predominantly populated by Arab Muslims, and had become known as Palestine, originally renamed by the Romans after the Philistines, the ancient enemies of the Israelites, as a final act of erasure.
This was the original wound beneath the wounding of our world’s wound, first cut almost two thousand years ago, and it’s still not healed to this day.
The Long Way Home
For centuries, the Jewish people wandered the world, displaced and wounded, carrying the memory of a home they had been torn from. Rising waves of antisemitism made clear that there was nowhere in Europe they would ever truly belong, nowhere they could set down roots without the threat of being uprooted again. From this grief, the Zionist movement was born in the late 1800s: the formalisation of a two-thousand-year longing to go home.
And home, for the Jewish people, had always meant one place. For the entire span of the diaspora, Jewish prayer faced toward Jerusalem. The phrase “next year in Jerusalem” had been spoken at Passover tables across every country they had wandered - a genuine, bone-deep yearning to return to the ancient heart of the Jewish world - the land of the Bible, the land of their ancestors, the land Rome had torn them from that they had never stopped grieving. In the late 19th century, Jewish people began making their way back home, legally purchasing land and establishing communities, only to find that home, in their long absence, had become home to someone else too, nestled as it was in the heart of the land then known as Palestine.
And then came the Holocaust, between 1933 and 1945, when Nazi Germany systematically murdered six million Jewish people during World War II - the worst atrocity the world had ever seen. When the camps were liberated and the full scale of what had happened was revealed to the world, the Western response looked like reckoning, but was really more like management - move fast, build institutions, write laws, say “never again” repeatedly with sufficient gravity, and above all, find an answer that makes the guilt bearable.
The West’s unprocessed Holocaust guilt needed somewhere to go, and in 1947 it went to the United Nations, which voted to partition Palestine, a land inhabited by hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs who had lived there for centuries, who had their own homes and farms and olive trees and cemeteries, and who had no part whatsoever in what Europe had done to the Jewish people. The UN partition divided a land it didn't own between a Jewish state and an Arab one, without meaningfully consulting the people living there.
Though the Arab world rejected the plan, Israel declared independence, and the West recognised it almost immediately. Approximately 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were expelled or fled in the war that accompanied Israel’s establishment. Their villages were destroyed and their return was refused - their existence as a people with a claim to that land was considered simply inconvenient.
On the day the State of Israel was declared in 1948, the Sun was in Taurus - the sign of the land - and Saturn, Mars, and Pluto were all in Leo - the sign of sovereignty; every placement speaking of a nation whose founding frequency was survival at any cost. But with Neptune in Libra - the planet of fog in the sign of justice - what was called balance was not fully balanced and what was presented as righteous had something unexamined within it.
The same sky that named Israel’s founding frequency also presided over Palestine’s wounding - what Palestinians call the Nakba, the Arabic word for “catastrophe.” And that is precisely what the sky that day contained: a sovereignty being born, and a people being unmade, under the same Neptune fog that called it justice.
This was the transfer of the original wound, as a people defined by the experience of being othered, expelled, and systematically exterminated built their safety on the othering and expulsion of another people. Not because they were evil, but because that is what unhealed wounds do. They don’t disappear - they find a new host. The traumatised become the traumatising, not from malice but from the simple, terrible logic of a pain that was never processed, only passed on.
The Western world, drowning in guilt, gave Israel its unconditional support and looked away from what that support required, and it has been looking away ever since. This was the wounding of the wounding of the wound.
Britain, and the Bully With the Big Bomb
Five years later, in August 1953, the same Neptune that had obscured the justice of 1948 locked into place with Saturn, crystallising the fog into structure, hardening the unexamined into policy, and the same Western powers that had established Israel by displacing the Palestinians turned their attention to Iran.
Iran at that moment had something extraordinary and rare - a functioning democracy, the seeds of which had been planted decades earlier when Iran became one of the first nations in Asia to establish a parliament and limits to royal power through a constitution.
By the early 1950s, though the path to democracy had been turbulent, and the Shah still sat on the throne, a genuine parliamentary democracy had taken root, and its Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, was everything the West claimed to want from the Middle East: elected, secular, educated, and committed to constitutional governance and the rule of law. He believed so deeply in democratic process that Time Magazine named him Man of the Year in 1951 - the first Middle Eastern leader ever to receive that honour.
But then he dared to nationalise Iran’s oil in the ground, sealing his fate. At the time, Britain had been extracting Iranian oil for almost fifty years under a contract so lopsided it was essentially colonialism with paperwork. Iran received approximately sixteen percent of the profits from its own natural resource while Britain took the rest, leaving Iranian workers labouring in refineries for an energy source they could not afford to heat their own homes with. Mosaddegh looked at this arrangement and said, with the full democratic authority of his elected office, that the oil belonged to Iran and Iran was taking it back. The Iranian parliament voted unanimously to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company - later renamed British Petroleum, or BP - and the Iranian people celebrated in the streets.
Meanwhile, Britain threw a tantrum and called it theft, but didn’t have the muscle to bully its way to a solution, as it might have done a century earlier. The British empire had begun crumbling since the early 1900s after India demanded its independence and two world wars decimated its supremacy, and by the end of World War II, a new global bully had emerged in the United States. After spending its first 150 years warring with itself, America turned its fight on the rest of the world by dropping the first and only nuclear weapon ever used in war on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Incinerating approximately 200,000 people in two days established the United States as the bully with the big bomb that Britain could turn to to solve its Iran problem.
Initially, the United States didn’t care to help Britain get its oil back - it wasn’t until the case was repackaged in Cold War language specifically designed for American ears that the Brits got any traction. With the Korean War in full swing and McCarthyism running rampant, America was terrified of “reds under the bed,” and agreed to assist Britain only when it was framed as a way to stop Iran from falling to the Russian communists.
The CIA approved a covert operation that Britain’s MI6 initiated to make Mosaddegh’s government appear unstable, bribing Iranian military officers to switch their allegiance, and paying street gangs to pose as Mosaddegh supporters and cause violent chaos. Journalists and newspaper editors were paid to run propaganda, and religious figures were paid to denounce Mosaddegh from the pulpit, spreading rumours that he was a communist, that he was anti-Islam, and that he was a foreign puppet.
Shockingly, this covert operation was blessed by the Shah, who signed CIA-drafted decrees to dismiss Mosaddegh before losing his nerve and fleeing to Rome when the first undercover plot failed. It looked, briefly, like it was over, but on August 19, 1953, the second attempt succeeded. The military turned, Mosaddegh surrendered, and the Shah flew back from Rome to claim the absolute power the CIA had purchased for him. The man who would torture Iran for the next twenty-six years was installed by a suitcase of American money and a coward's signature, in exchange for restoring the flow of Iran's oil to the nations that had stolen it.
Meanwhile, Mosaddegh was sentenced to three years' solitary confinement and then kept under house arrest until his death a decade later, while many of his former associates and supporters were also tried, imprisoned, and tortured, and some were even sentenced to death and executed, for the apparent “crimes” of democracy.
The same Neptune that had fogged Israel’s justice of 1948 was still moving through Libra during the Iranian coup in 1953, now joined by Saturn - the planet of structure and authority - in the same sign of diplomacy. Together they named a deal being made and a balance being struck that was false; the iron fist wrapped so carefully in velvet that most people never felt the iron at all.
While Britain got its oil back, quietly pocketed the proceeds, and called it a day, the United States stayed, doubling down on the torture state they had jointly built, funding it, arming it, and defending it to the world, while leaving the American people completely in the dark about the covert operation to topple Iran’s democracy.
The CIA didn’t formally acknowledge its role in the coup until 2013 - sixty years later - when declassified documents confirmed what every Iranian had known since the morning it happened. They knew whose money paid the mobs and whose signatures were on the order that removed their democratically elected leader and replaced him with a vicious king. It was burned into their national memory.
Saturn-Neptune in Libra.
False balance.
Power in disguise.
The handshake that hid the knife.
The coup was called protecting democracy.
The theft of Iran’s oil was called preventing communist takeover.
The installation of a torturer was called Cold War necessity.
In the space of five years between 1948 and 1953, Western powers inflicted two foundational wounds on the Middle East in quick succession. First Palestine, to manage Western guilt about the Holocaust, then Iran, to manage British oil profits and American Cold War anxiety. Neither wound was about the people actually living there - Palestine wasn't consulted and Iran's democratic choice wasn't respected. In both cases, the West looked at the Middle East and saw not sovereign peoples with legitimate interests but a problem to be managed and a resource to be controlled.
The West treated the entire Middle East as its chessboard. Palestine was a square to place a piece on, and Iran was a square to keep clear of the wrong players, and both moves created consequences that are still detonating today, cutting wounds - long festering - that are now rising, demanding to be healed.
The Twisting of the Knife
After the coup in 1953, the Shah was reinstated as absolute ruler of Iran with full American and British backing - military aid, economic support, diplomatic cover, and CIA assistance in building his secret police force, known as SAVAK. But it wasn’t just American intelligence that helped build SAVAK - Israel's Mossad helped too.
The same Israel established five years earlier in the name of never again, whose founding was justified by the Holocaust’s horror, worked alongside the CIA to build and train the apparatus that would go on to became one of the most feared intelligence services in the world, surveilling, arresting, torturing and disappearing political dissidents, journalists, intellectuals, students, and anyone who represented the ghost of the Iranian democracy removed in 1953. And through all of it, Washington said nothing because the Shah was their man, the oil was flowing the right direction and the Cold War required allies willing to hold the line.
While Britain and the United States prospered, the Iranian people lived under the rule of the murderous regime they’d installed for a quarter of a century, watching their democratic experiment be replaced by a torture state underwritten by the nation that called itself the leader of the free world, while understanding, with absolute clarity, what those promises of freedom were actually worth as America twisted its knife in the wound it helped make.
By the late 1970s, the Shah’s SAVAK had become so brutally effective at suppressing political opposition that the only organised institution left standing was the mosque. The only place Iranians could gather, speak, and organise without SAVAK immediately knowing about it was in religious spaces, guaranteeing that when the revolution came, it would be led by clerics like Ruhollah Khomeini.
Khomeini - an Ayatollah, meaning a high-ranking religious scholar - was a vocal critic of the Shah who spoke on behalf of a broad coalition of Iranians who felt the Shah was selling their country to foreign interests. When Khomeini said America was controlling Iran and that the Shah was a puppet, he was saying what millions of Iranians knew to be true - they remembered what the CIA had done in 1953.
The Shah expelled him in 1964, but exile only amplified his voice, until by the late 1970s, unrest had reached a breaking point. The Shah’s security forces massacred hundreds of protesters in Tehran’s Jaleh Square in September 1978, but instead of breaking the movement, it radicalised it completely. The Shah, secretly ill and psychologically broken, was paralysed by the mixed signals coming from the Carter administration - some officials urging crackdown, others urging liberalisation. The Americans had no contingency plan for the fall of the puppet they had installed, and the Shah had no answer for a people he had never been allowed to genuinely govern.
In January 1979, the Shah fled Iran, never to return, and Khomeini flew back from Paris to a reception of millions. By April 1979, the revolution was complete and the Islamic Republic was formally declared, born from a wound cut in 1953, and determined to make sure the United States would never again hold the keys to Iran.
The sky chart forged at the birth of the Islamic Republic shows the Sun in Aries in the 8th house of death, transformation and survival - a nation built not to crumble under pressure, but one that consolidates and draws power from existential threat. And the natal Pluto sits in Libra, where Saturn and Neptune had first cut the wound - in the twenty-six years since the coup of 1953, the planet of transformation through destruction had worked its way through the zodiac to the exact place where Saturn and Neptune had originally sealed Iran’s wound, and detonated it, completing what both planets began.
For the United States, the Islamic Republic was its own wound - the humiliation of losing Iran in 1979, most viscerally felt in the 444-day hostage crisis that followed, became a national wound so raw it has shaped American foreign policy ever since. But America processed that wound as Iranian irrationality rather than as the consequence of its own actions, and in doing so, ensured it would never fully heal.
Religious Rule, from East to West
Through the 1980’s, the Iranian revolution rapidly consolidated under Khomeini into a theocratic project that declared Islamic law would govern the state of Iran, leaving no room for the pluralism that had briefly united it. Women were forced into hijab. Music was banned. Homosexuality became punishable by death. Political dissidents - many of them the same secular leftists and democrats who had marched alongside the religious in overthrowing the Shah - were imprisoned, tortured, and executed in their thousands. Khomeini’s theocracy and its chants of “Death to America” rose directly from what the United States had done in 1953 - the covert actions that had set Iran on its path to torment. In many ways, this modern day Iran was made in the USA.
Just months after the Iranian Revolution installed Khomeini’s theocracy, the United States moved in the direction of a theocracy of its own when it elected Ronald Reagan as president in November 1980, a moment now widely regarded as the beginning of the Christian Nationalist capture of the Republican Party. The coalition that put Reagan in the White House was built substantially on evangelical Christian voters who believed America was a Christian nation and that its secular drift represented a spiritual emergency. Under Reagan and successive Republican administrations, abortion rights were targeted, LGBTQ existence was framed as moral corruption, and the language of spiritual warfare - us against them, the righteous against the corrupt - became the vocabulary of mainstream right-wing politics.
Two nations, one year apart, both handed to religious fundamentalists.
Both fundamentalisms needed each other. Iran’s Islamic Republic required an external enemy to justify its authoritarian project - America, the Great Satan, the corrupter of Muslim nations. America’s Christian nationalism required an external enemy to justify its own consolidation - the Islamic terrorist, the civilisational threat, the proof that God’s chosen nation was under attack. Each one fed the other’s fear, and as each one pointed across the water at a fearsome “them,” it tightened its grip on its own people.
Anti-women.
Anti-gay.
Anti-democratic.
Anti-dissent.
The Islamic Republic and America’s Christian Nationalists are not opposites - they are mirrors. Two wounded civilisations, both captured by their most frightened voices, both using God as armour against a complexity they could not metabolise. Iran’s fear was rooted in what America had done to them. America’s fear was rooted in something even older - the fear the religious Puritans had felt when they were chased out of England in the 1600s and were forced to flee to a new world in order to maintain control of everyone and everything through scripture.
And they are not the only mirrors - Israel's religious nationalist movement, which has steadily captured its politics, and Hamas, which rose from the ruins of Palestinian hope, are mirrors of each other too. Israel's fear was rooted in the Holocaust, and freshly reopened on October 7, 2023, when Hamas killed 1,200 people in the worst massacre of Jewish people since the Nazi death camps. Palestine's fear was rooted in the Nakba, and has been freshly reopened every decade since, through occupation, settlement, blockade, and a campaign in Gaza that has killed tens of thousands of civilians and left an entire population without food, water, or shelter.
Today, Israeli settlers justify the occupation of Palestinian land with biblical scripture, and Hamas justifies its violence with Islamic theology - two peoples so deep in their wounds that God has become the deed to the land rather than the path beyond it. The old wounds keep rising for healing, and each time, these nations choose to become the wound instead.
This is not a condemnation of faith - real faith has always known how to lay things down. This is about what happens when the sacred gets conscripted into the wound's service - when God becomes the justification for the wall rather than the invitation to take it down.
Just this week, as bombs fell in the Middle East, reports emerged of a non-commissioned officer inside the United States military sending an urgent message writing on behalf of themselves and fifteen fellow troops to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation - an organisation that monitors extremism inside the armed forces.
Their complaint was that a commander had opened a briefing about a live war by telling the soldiers in the room not to be afraid, because what was happening in Iran was all part of God’s divine plan. He cited the Book of Revelation, spoke of Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ, and said, “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” According to the complaint, he had a big grin on his face when he said it.
This was not one rogue commander - more than 110 complaints have been received from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, with more than 200 total complaints from personnel serving in the army, navy, air force, marine corps, and space force.
Commanders scheduling emergency Bible study sessions the night before potential deployments. Officers telling their troops that this is holy war. That the bombs are God’s will. That Donald Trump is a divine instrument of biblical prophecy. US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth has reportedly installed monthly prayer meetings throughout the Pentagon and attends a weekly White House Bible study led by a preacher who teaches that God commands America to support Israel - that to stand with Israel is to stand with God, and to oppose it is to invite God's curse.
One American political commentator said this week,“So let me get this straight. We’re the theocracy? We’re the religious lunatics?”
Just as Iran has military commanders who believe they are fighting a holy war ordained by God, America now has military commanders saying the same thing. Just as Hamas frames every rocket as an act of divine resistance, Israel's Prime Minister stands at a bombed site quoting Torah, comparing Iran to the Amalekites - an ancient biblical enemy God commanded the Israelites to annihilate. Four parties to the same conflict, all invoking the same God, all certain of divine sanction. The mirror is no longer a metaphor.
This is multiple wounds staring at each other from behind firing lines, so lost in the pain they can no longer see straight, hurling missiles and lobbing torpedos, as if that will help them pass through this transit.
But the sky is saying clearly - no more.
Good Guys, Bad Guys
For most of our lifetimes, we carved the world into good guys and bad guys. The split was straightforward - the West was good, the rest needed correcting. Democracy was ours to defend and theirs to receive, delivered if necessary by force. Freedom was our gift to a world that didn’t always know it needed it. We built institutions, and wrote laws, and said all the right things, and then we looked away while the people who built those institutions behaved in ways that made a mockery of every word.
The United States has long touted itself as the defender of freedom, guarantor of democracy, the indispensable nation, the city upon a hill whose light guides the world toward liberty. But can a nation really be a champion of democracy when it has spent seventy years removing democratic governments that inconvenience its economic interests? Iran. Chile. Vietnam. Iraq. Libya. How can that nation be the good guy when it’s the one always dropping the bombs - the only nation on earth to have used nuclear weapons in war? America has never collectively reckoned with the two Japanese cities full of incinerated civilians - it just sits in the national shadow like a thing too large to look at directly.
Israel is no different - the only democracy in the Middle East, the eternal victim, a nation forged in the fires of genocide that only ever acts in self-defence. But like the United States, it has repeatedly pointed at Iran and Hamas and declared them the bad guys - which is not necessarily incorrect, but it is not the whole story either. You can't burn someone's house down and then act confused about why they're trying to set yours on fire. You can't invoke “never again” as your founding covenant and then conduct a campaign in Gaza that the International Court of Justice has found grounds to investigate as genocide.
Here, under the harsh light of these skies, the good guy, bad guy story is at last being seen for what it always was - a simplified narrative that exempted its tellers from the standards they demanded of everyone else. Not a lie exactly, but a mirror held at a carefully chosen angle, reflecting only the parts worth showing.
But the mirror cuts both ways. Iran has spent forty-seven years calling America the Great Satan while building a theocracy that tortures its own people, executes dissidents, and brutalises its women and its gay citizens with the same systematic cruelty it learned from SAVAK. The wound of 1953 was real, but it does not justify what was built in its name. Likewise, Hamas was born from the ruins of Palestinian hope - the Nakba was real, the occupation is real, the dispossession is real - and none of it justifies the deliberate massacre of civilians, the taking of hostages, or the use of its own people as shields. You cannot demand the world see your wound while refusing to see the wounds you are making.
Every party in this conflict has a legitimate grievance. Every party has also committed acts that no grievance justifies. When you spend decades declaring yourself the good guy while behaving like the bad guy, you do not accumulate goodwill - you accumulate karma, and Saturn always comes to collect, here at the transit where the sky itself says, enough. You do not get to carry this through.
There are no good guys. There are no bad guys. There are just wounds - everywhere - and the choices we make about what to do with them. We are not watching a war between enemies, but the accumulated weight of years, decades, and centuries of unhealed wounds arriving, simultaneously, at the passage that will not let them through.
You Shall Not Pass
In 1953, when the United States and Britain were inflicting Iran’s original wound, Saturn and Neptune were conjunct in Libra creating the false balance that called itself protection, but was really just a coup. In the seventy-three years since, both planets have continued their journeys around the sun, until just last month, in February 2026, they met again in conjunction, this time in Aries, the direct opposite of Libra.
Where Libra is diplomacy, negotiation, and the carefully constructed agreement, Aries is raw, unmediated, unarmoured truth. Aries doesn’t hide behind the handshake - it shows you exactly what it is.
This year’s Saturn-Neptune conjunction occurred at zero degrees Aries, the absolute beginning point of the entire zodiac, in direct opposition to the conjunction that presided over the 1953 Iranian coup, completing the cycle. What was sealed in Libra seventy-three years ago with false balance and a cover story was met in Aries this year with the mask completely off. There was no diplomatic cover in this confrontation, and no polished language about Cold War necessity or protecting freedom. Just the wound, exposed, on all sides, in full view.
Iran’s natal chart sat directly in the path of this conjunction, with Saturn, Neptune, and Mars all transiting Aries, all bearing down on its Sun in the 8th house of death and transformation - the signature of a forced reckoning with survival, a confrontation with the version of itself born in 1979. The Islamic Republic being pressure-tested at its most fundamental frequency.
Simultaneously, Saturn and Neptune are sitting on the United States’ IC - the very foundation of the chart, the base on which the whole national architecture rests, and Neptune there dissolving the story America tells itself about its own foundations, while Saturn demands a structural reckoning with the reality underneath the story.
This transit lit up Israel’s chart, and Palestines and the UK’s as well. The number of nations whose charts were activated by the unprecedented Saturn Neptune conjunction is too numerous to count. A world full of nations under the same Saturn-Neptune pressure, all being asked the same question by the same sky, simultaneously: Who are you, really, underneath the story you have been telling?
This is the transit that removes the option of passing through without healing - the narrow walls closing in on either side, leaving no room for baggage. We will pass through healed, or we will not pass through at all.
The End of the Oldest Story
Every conjunction of Saturn and Neptune is rare, but the one we just lived through is in a category of its own. To find the last time these two planets met at this precise degree, you have to go all the way back to 4361 BCE, approximately 6,381 years ago, and even then, the conjunction wasn’t quite as exact as the one we just witnessed.
4361 BCE predates written language by nearly a thousand years. No civilisation existed with the astronomical sophistication to witness and record that conjunction - there was no way to carry the memory of it forward. The entire story of the world’s wound - from Rome’s destruction of Jerusalem, to the Holocaust, to the displacement of Palestine, to the coup in Iran, to the fundamentalist nations now pointing missiles at each other - all of it has unfolded inside a single astrological cycle that no people in all of recorded human history have ever completed before.
We are the first.
This is what the Genesis Reset actually means. Not a fresh start in the comfortable sense - not a clean slate handed to us because we asked nicely - but a reset in the most literal, astronomical sense: the cycle that has been running for longer than human beings have been writing things down has now completed. The old story is over - the wound has run out of cycle to hide in.
Zero degrees Aries is the absolute beginning, and what every beginning demands, before anything new can be built, is that the ground be cleared, which is precisely what we are watching right now. The chaos tearing through every institution, every alliance, every story we told ourselves about how the world worked - this is not collapse, but clearance. The old rot coming up because it has nowhere left to go. The wounds that were sealed in Libra in 1953, that were transferred in 1948, that were first cut back in 70 CE - they are all surfacing simultaneously because the cycle that allowed them to be carried forward has ended.
And in the face of that, we are seeing that some people, some nations, and some systems would rather die than heal.
For them, the wound has become identity. The enemy has become necessary. The baggage has been carried so long it no longer feels like baggage - it feels like self. To put it down would feel like disappearing, and so they grip it tighter as the transit walls close in, and they invoke Armageddon, and they fire missiles, and they call it God’s will, because that’s what it looks like when a wound chooses itself over healing at the end of a 6,381-year cycle.
But this transit does not negotiate.
Under this sky, they will get their wish.
And we will also get ours.
In our own lives, our own bodies, our own relationships and families and quiet reckoning moments, the wound is ending for us all too. The same sky pressing on Iran and America and Israel and the world is pressing on every person reading this, too. The old rot is coming up for everyone, and everything that has been carried too long, everything that was inherited without being chosen, everything that calcified into armour that no longer protects but only prevents - it is all surfacing now because it cannot be carried into the new cycle.
Here at the end of the age and the dawn of the new, the question is the same one it has always been, just with stakes higher than any generation before us has faced: will we become the wound, or heal?
If we heal, we pass through the portal.
But if we become the wound, we cannot progress to the new world that awaits us.
The sky is not asking us to be unafraid, or to have it all figured out. It’s simply asking us to feel into what is actually present - beneath the wound, beneath the story built around the wound, beneath the enemy required to justify the wound - and find what was always there underneath. The part of us that knows how to be present without consulting the doctrine of past pain. The part that knows the difference between a boundary and a wall, between discernment and armour, between grief that moves and grief that calcifies.
The wound stops here and the new story starts now. And it starts - as every new story does - not with nations or conjunctions or historical turning points, but with each of us individually sitting with ourselves and deciding what to put down.
If you are feeling the weight of this moment - in your body, in your relationships, in the particular grief or rage or exhaustion that this time has stirred in you - that is not weakness. That is the wound asking to be witnessed, finally, rather than carried.
The sky is not asking us to forget.
It is asking us, finally, after all this time, to put the heavy thing down.
The Loud Crescendo
The months ahead will bring the sound of things that chose the wound over healing finally meeting the consequences of that choice.
It will look like escalation.
It will look like leaders doubling down on what brought them here.
It will look, at times, like the world has lost its mind entirely.
And in a sense it has - we are leaving the Age of the Mind and entering the Age of the Heart, and only those who have cultivated their heart will know what to do once their mind works out it’s running on borrowed time, propped up by a story that the sky has now refused to keep telling.
Let these coming months be loud. The loudness is not danger - it is the sound of the old order discovering that the ground it was standing on has already gone.
For those of us who have done even some of the work - who have sat with the wound, who have traced it back to its origin, who have chosen even once to put something down rather than carry it forward - these months are not the end. They are confirmation. The world we could feel coming, the one that kept pressing against the inside of things asking to be let out, is arriving, quietly, beneath the noise of collapse.
We do not have to hold the line against what is collapsing, or enforce karma, or ensure that those who caused harm are seen to suffer for it. The sky is handling that, and Saturn is extraordinarily good at his job. Our work is not justice - it is healing. Our work is to become, in our own bodies and lives and relationships, the thing the new world needs more of: people who are no longer run by the wound.
That means letting what is asking to be healed, heal. Not performing healing and not announcing it. Just the quiet, unglamorous, daily act of choosing presence over doctrine, grief that moves over grief that calcifies, the boundary over the wall.
We don’t have to become new people.
We just have to put down what was never ours to carry forever.
The portal is open. It has always been exactly this narrow. And we are exactly the right size to walk through it, as long as we don’t insist on bringing everything we’ve ever been hurt by.
Put it down.
Walk through.
That’s all.
If you need some support laying down what you’ve been carrying, come join me in the Daily Lighthouse. I’ll be there, each day with you, or if you prefer it in an audio listening format, head over to the Resonance Room.
See you next Sunday, friends. Until then, have COURAGE, and stay kind, stay fierce, and stay human.
Onwards!
Thank you so much for the clarity Wiz. I've never heard the middle east story told so clearly. You must spend a lot of time researching. 🩷
I don’t read much of anything on social media anymore. Your stack being the one exception. And this post is exemplary of why. I’ve never in my entire life heard or read of any historically accurate — and so simply and factually stated — account of the US-Western Europe-Middle East geopolitical situation until today. This should be printed off and handed out as mandatory reading in every Western high school world history and US Government class. THIS. Let’s accept responsibility for what was done, remove the scales from our eyes, and then lay it down for good! Damn good job on this week’s wrap up Wiz! Bravo 👏