“We are in a time of great transition on whatever level you want to view it. … From January 2008 through March 16, 2015, the period known as “The Cardinal Climax” unfolded, in which Saturn, Uranus, and Pluto all moved into a hard aspect with one another, and mostly from within [...]
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A Time of Transition
Ray Merriman on the Debt Crisis
As we all know now, we are living in interesting times, but sometimes it’s hard to keep up with just what is going on. The scene changes so rapidly; opinions vary so wildly. The financial astrologer Ray Merriman has written a brilliant piece for The Mountain Astrologer which explains [...]
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Ceres, Food and Revolutions
Shopping for bread in the middle of a riot can be hectic. Tunisia. Have you looked closely at your grocery bill recently? It’s gone through the roof in the last 12 months right. I’m sure inflation for food is way ahead of the official figure. So I was intrigued to read this piece [...]
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News of the World: The Bitter End
Well, here’s a load of cobblers. The Romans had the Colosseum; we have the gutter press. Usually, it’s the evisceration of a celebrity’s private life that rouses the public’s bloodlust. But today, the News of the World, Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper, was [...]
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Astrology of now: Pay Attention to Your Dreams
Here in Oxford, we are having an extraordinarily beautiful autumn. The leaves are lambent red and gold, yellow and bright green. The air is very still, slightly damp and shining. It is unusually warm, so the light is not crisp and sharp, but gleaming. In short it is like a dream. I cycled back [...]
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Shrinking Britain
Cometh the hour, cometh the man. George Osborne is going to be one of the most hated public figures of our time. But he can take it This afternoon George Osborne, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, gave the most important speech of his life – and maybe ours. Is this a full [...]
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From beneath the earth…
After making the sun and the moon and the sky and the mountains and the sea, and after making the animals and the birds and the trees, the creator decided to make something really special. So he fashioned men and women out of clay. But he did not want them all to be the same, […]
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Astrologer’s Serendipity
Martin Luther declares war on the Catholic Church. copyright Trustees of the British Museum. Serendipity – what a lovely word. I’ve just had a beautiful serendipitous moment. You find out one thing while you’re looking for something else. In this case, I looked into the past [...]
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A Fairytale Ending for Milibands
Once upon a time there was a miller who had three sons. When he died his oldest son took the mill, his middle son took the donkey, and that left the youngest son with nothing but the cat. Well, we know who got the better deal in the end. Puss-in-boots helps the youngest son to […]
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The Subtle Knife
Whenever I go past the alley of trees in this picture, I think of how somewhere between them may be the Sunderland Avenue, North Oxford, Summer 2010.gateway to a parallel Oxford. In His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman‘s fantasy trilogy, Will Parry, the boy hero, creates an invisible [...]
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The generation that won’t shut up
Gustave Doré’s Red Riding Hood. Usually, conversational gambits at the school gates go something like this: “How is Ermyntrude settling in?” “Isn’t the traffic awful?” “A bit nippy this morning eh?” Not the most thrilling set of references. So [...]
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David Cameron, Jupiter and death
David Cameron with his first son Ivan in 2002. Ivan died in 2009. It’s remarkable how often in families a death and a birth happen in quick succession. Poor David Cameron lost his father today just weeks after his wife gave birth to that darling baby. My wise friend Judith, who has seen [...]
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Why I love Mercury retrograde
Yes – it’s that time again. Mercury is retrograde, so astrologers say don’t put anything in the post, don’t sign contracts, don’t buy computers, don’t make plans bla bla bla. If you paid attention to that you’d be spending about a fifth of your year [...]
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Times are changing
This is from an old copy of the defunct magazine Punch. I can never see the joke, but it does seem appropriate. We had dinner with an entertainingly gloomy Irishman last night. He’s clearly enjoying the credit crunch a lot – because it means that he can wallow in deepest pessimism, [...]
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Cork that gusher – yadda yadda yadda
My mother phoned up this morning to tell me that she had her very own gusher staying with her – in the form of a dear friend who talks a lot. He’s lovely but he chatters so much that she feels as if she’s drowning in a sea of words. I happen to know he’s […]
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