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. [...]

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 [...]

So now it’s naughty little Cyprus, the island of Aphrodite, which is giving the eurozone the screaming abdabs. Aphrodite is the Greek Venus, of course. In astrology, Venus rules money, so maybe it’s not such a surprise that Cyprus was, until a week ago, a great place to get your [...]

Yachts Racing in the Upper Bay — James Edward Butterworth Like a ship in full sail, the planets are billowing across the sky on today’s New Moon in Pisces. You have to use your imagination a bit to see it, but then we are in the midst of powerful Piscean energy, so I am sure […]

Mami Wata 1999, by Moyo Ogundipe   It’s Mothering Sunday here. The Moon (Mama) is in the sign of the Fishes, coming up to conjunct the Sun in a day or so. Mama Wata, Yemanya, La Sirene — these are all names for the mother of the ocean worshipped in West Africa, Brazil, the [...]

Ursula Andress – Sun, Venus, Mercury, Saturn in Pisces There’s an incredible amount of energy in the sign of the fishes this month, helped by the bicentennial transit of Neptune through the sign. Neptune is joint ruler of Pisces, along with Jupiter, but since he comes so seldom, [...]

Benedict XVI steps down tomorrow Pope Benedict XVI has the chart of a true “Prince of the Church“. He has the two planets of power, Saturn and Jupiter,  near the axes of his chart. This is something you see in royalty, people born to rule. In the case of the Pope, Jupiter is in the [...]

A still from the TV show Mad Men Henry Kissinger said power is an aphrodisiac. Well, it works for some people, but you know what, a lot of us don’t find it that attractive. The two top stories in the news here in the UK today are about sex and power.  The gay-bashing head of […]

The Reader by Federico Faruffini. I found this on the wonderful blog Reading and Art. “I awoke one morning with the usual perplexity of mind which accompanies the return of consciousness. As I lay and looked through the eastern window of my room, a faint streak of peach-colour, dividing [...]

All these women have Venus in Aquarius. Christy Turlington Kate Moss Elle Macpherson Sienna Miller Paris Hilton Charlotte Rampling Sharon Stone Marlene Dietrich

The Moon from De Sphaera As I write, the Moon is running the gamut of an opposition to Pluto. She’s in her own sign, Cancer, so she’s no pushover, even for the lord of the Underworld. But as she slides through the sea of Cancer, she brings into action all kinds of interesting [...]

It all started with this picture. The sculpture’s called Spring and I thought it was a pretty good representation of Lilith conjunct Sun in Capricorn. Lilith is, of course, all that is unmentionable and dark about the feminine. She is, among other things, the vagina dentata. I believe [...]

Plaintive, beautiful, broken, nostalgic. David Bowie’s new single Where Are We Now?, released today, is a return to his Berlin years both lyrically and musically. Bowie’s 66th birthday is today – maybe a good moment to recall those times in Berlin (1976-1979) when he produced some [...]

Indians have taken to the streets to protest against violence against women. India, the world’s biggest democracy, is a great big bhel puri of languages, religions, customs and manners.  Special interests are as diverse as religious customs, but for the past month Indians have been [...]

Negotiating 2012 required a sound umbrella and a stiff upper lip. Hurricane Sandy Well, that was quite a year. We have all been buffeted by the stormy energies of the planets in 2012. In particular, the cardinal signs – Aries, Capricorn, Cancer and Libra – have been in a high wind. It’s [...]

Rene Magritte: Rider in the Woods My friend Q has been rather cross recently. As far as she is concerned, life is not working out. Somewhere on the journey, she took a wrong turn and found herself in a thicket of gorse and shale instead of travelling through the beautiful beech wood she had [...]

With his customary impeccable timing (Saturn in Virgo), jazzman Dave Brubeckwas died yesterday, just two days short of his 92nd birthday. But today is his actual Solar Return, the moment in the year the Sun returns to the place it was when you were born. The planets of ending and [...]

Various Aspects by Deborah Stevenson Is your head about to explode  From information overload? Just asking. Last time Jupiter was in Gemini, the internet was probably not in your pocket. That was 12 years ago. Jupiter is the planet of expansion. Gemini is the sign of facts, data, journalism, [...]