Lévi- Strauss’s seminal book La Pensee Sauvage is translated into English as the Savage Mind, which is not quite right, of course, and sounds vaguely pejorative. Sauvage means wild, as in the opposite of domesticated. Pensée is thought. So you could read this more as Untamed Thinking. [...]

Ceres by Antoine Watteau. The asteroid Ceres was discovered more than two centuries ago, but it’s taken astrologers a long time to acknowledge her as a contender. Astronomers now classify her on the same level as Pluto. The sickle she holds here is also her astrological symbol. One of [...]

May 25th sees the final eclipse in the Gemini-Sagittarius group that’s spanned November 2o1o until now. You can see it’s at 4° Sagittarius. In the way of these eclipse groups, it has overlapped at one end with Cancer-Capricorn and now it’s overlapping at this end with [...]

The art establishment’s favourite entrepreneur is on the radio this morning, so I thought I’d repost a piece I wrote about him. It made me laugh again, but that is part of Hirst’s charm. To read it, click here.

Feminist poster from the sixties I’m still pondering the significance of the world’s biggest sex symbol removing her secondary sexual characteristics. Did it really come down to a choice between desirability or living? And if it did come down to that choice for Angelina Jolie, what [...]

Yesterday Angelina Jolie told the world she’d had an operation that reduces her risk of cancer from 87% to 5%. She’d had a double mastectomy. That one of the world’s most beautiful women should choose to have both breasts removed is a powerful notion. Jolie in particular has [...]

Halvor kills the troll in Soria Moria Castle. “My name is Amanda Berry.” The first words she spoke after she crawled out of the house of her enslavement in Cleveland, Ohio were a statement of her identity. Amanda Berry is much more than what happened to her. Her decade-long [...]

Ribbons on a maypole Whenever I sit down and talk to someone about a chart, it strikes me afresh just how interesting and unexpected people’s stories are. Everyone’s life is not just one story but a whole necklace of tales threaded together by one soul. Those tales, of course, [...]

Lovely Audrey Hepburn, b. May 4 Is there a Taurus “look”? Judge for yourself. There’s a whole collection of very beautiful Bulls in this previous post on the Oxford Astrologer. Click here.

detail from a painting by Alphonse Mucha Two eclipses and a Jupiter-Venus-Mercury love fest at the end of the month. May looks both exciting and rather delicious. To read your horoscope, click here.

On the evening of November 18, 1987 an inferno blasted through King’s Cross underground station, killing 31 people, and injuring and maiming three times that number. The causes were negligence and a discarded match. Two weeks ago, the BBC reunited people who were directly involved in the [...]

Kali dancing on Shiva. Kali is associated with the North Node, Rahu, in Hindu astrology. Take a look at the comments on the previous post and you’ll see that readers have already come up with some telling examples of how eclipses across Taurus/Scorpio have worked for them in the past. [...]

Gradually, the familiar golden ball slides behind a disc of silver. Birds fall silent, the air chills, for a moment the day is strange. Solar eclipse. A superseding, a complete annihilation.  Emotionally, in English anyway, the word eclipse contains a grain of fear. A black shadow, exactly the [...]

The “Minutemen”, American revolutionaries ready to snatch up their weapons at a moment’s notice, confront the redcoats. Their flexibility, speed and the urgency of their cause was a big factor in their victory. Allied to the fact that they were on home territory. Even though [...]

To celebrate Venus’s entry into Taurus, where she revels in earthly pleasure, here is a piece I wrote about this beautiful painting by Sandro Botticelli. Click here to read it.

I wonder if Walt Whitman was experiencing a Pluto transit when he wrote this poem.    Pluto is now retrograde until September. The dark planet spends quite a lot of his time in retrograde motion, so it’s not unusual. He’s moving between 11’35 and 8’59 Capricorn.   You [...]

Preity Zinta and Shahrukh Khan in Veer Zaara Love: comes in like a thunderbolt, and goes out like a monsoon. Especially if some heavy planets are involved. It can be pretty depressing when you’re just in the midst of the monsoon part and you regard Uranus and Neptune in your house of [...]

Winning her second term 1983. The whole country was frozen, dry and still in March and early April. In my garden, which at this time of year is usually bursting with buoyant blooms, nothing changed for weeks. This was all due to the strange, bitter weather, of course. Spring had been arrested. [...]

I am off-line now for Easter break. I’ll be back in the second week of April. A bientôt!

This week is going to be a firecracker, as the Sun, Mars, Venus cluster around unpredictable Uranus in Aries, the touchpaper sign.  The Moon is already involved with this, making a quincunx aspect to that pack of planets shortly, which creates a Yod with Saturn in Scorpio. This is all [...]