Danny Kaye had a Sun-Uranus conjunction in Capricorn. I read a post over at Libra Seeking Balance this week which reminded me that Uranus + Mercury = funny. Now I can vouch for this personally since I live with the funniest man I could find, and he has Merc + Uranus on the Ascendant. [...]

Andy Murray: finding the emotional strength The Men’s Final at Wimbledon this year was so graceful and exciting. And always, it was not just a test of physical prowess – although the sheer animal magic of the occasion was beautiful – but a contest of mental stamina and [...]

Millais’ Ophelia – suspended in a dream. It’s emotional, it’s dreamy, it’s images and colours, not words. It’s a misty vision on the edge of your mind, and the time between sleeping and waking. It’s a pool of water reflecting the sky with a fish [...]

As you know, astrology works through metaphor and imagery. You arrive at an understanding of a sign or a planet elliptically, and a story unfolds through the multiple elements weaving together. But all combinations have the potential to tell different stories. So for example, consider Neptune [...]

The Princess and the Pea by Edmund Dulac. Here is the second part of Renée Lascala fresh look at Jupiter in Cancer. These ideas are not just for those of you who have planets in Cancer. All of us should honour the king’s visit to the sign of the Crab.   Jupiter’s 2013-14 visit to […]

Charles Robinson’s illustration for Shelley’s The Sensitive Plant. I asked Cancerian fellow astrologer Renée Lascala to write about Jupiter’s ingress into her Sun sign, which takes place this week.  Jupiter will travel through Cancer for a full 12 months, so we’d better [...]

Hands off our national treasure My friend down the road never “bakes a cake”, she “does a Nigella”. I’m sure she’s not alone. Is there a kitchen bookshelf in Britain that does not have a thumbed edition of How To Eat or Feast or some other of Nigella [...]

The creatures of the Zodiac cavort in a loop through the sky that takes us from midwinter to midsummer and back again. We are used to thinking of them as starting with Aries the Ram and ending with Pisces, the Fishes. But there is another way of ordering the Zodiac that can help you to […]

U-Plu It’s all been a bit jagged for, well, years. For most people, the ongoing U-Plu (Uranus-Pluto square) has not gone smash-bang and changed everything. It’s felt more like a massive arduous grinding shift; a huge stone cog that judders along, sending out sparks every now and [...]

The Rhinemaidens The Elbe, the Vistula, the Inn, the mighty Danube himself, the busy Rhine – the rivers of central Europe are swollen, bursting their banks, rolling across the countryside, swallowing roads, cars, houses. Twenty people have lost their lives. The river gods are hungry. They are [...]

The angels are calling Nelson Mandela. He may not go yet, but they are very close. When a death is at the right time, often Jupiter, the planet of benevolence and generosity arrives, ready to shepherd the soul on its journey. Mandela’s Jupiter Return is on June 3Oth. When Mandela was [...]

I’ve just had the best massage I’ve ever experienced. Waves of healing energy swooshing all over the place. And S came and did it on our lawn in the golden afternoon sunshine. Mercury rules the hands and he’s opposite Pluto -deep healing – right now, creating a glorious [...]

Low tide Cornwall, high noon. As the tide pulls away from the shore, a wondrous world of rock pools is revealed. Anemones, starfish, crabs. Slippery seaweed. Broken fishing nets, plastic bottles, a locked box, a glove. Detritus along the high tide mark. A dead crab. Thousands of glistening [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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.