Sadko In The Underwater Kingdom by Ilya Repin (Wikimedia Commons) From Tunisia to Elizabeth Taylor, you never know who you’re going to swim past down there in the blue, blue sea. With the Sun still in Pisces, visit or revisit these OA posts on or about the sign of the Fishes. A Fortnight [...]

Saturn’s move into Sagittarius back in December came as a huge relief to many people — except maybe those born under the sign of the centaur and those born with Saturn in Sagittarius, for whom this will be the dreaded “Return”. This month, the planet Saturn is [...]

The Sun, which brings light to us, and Neptune, lord of mystic revelation, are conjunct this week.  Magic is all around us, especially if we know how to look. To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity […]

Lush with satin and velvet, beautifully lit by candles and England’s cool northern daylight, the TV adaptation of Wolf Hall is as enthralling as the book. At the centre of the bedizened, voluptuous court of Henry VIII, there is a still, dark point, Thomas Cromwell. For more on the story [...]

“I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart, and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to [...]

A statue of the Celtic sea god Manannan Mac Lir was stolen from an Irish mountaintop on January 21, the day Mercury, the planet of thieves, went retrograde. Although Manannan is the “son of the sea” and a deity of storms, but he has more in common with Mercury than Neptune. [...]

Twelve people at the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were gunned down on January 7. In the same week, Saudi blogger Raif Badawi received the first 50 lashes of his 1000-lash sentence for blasphemy, ironically, an echo of the Charlie Hebdo cover that caused such offense in [...]

Happy New Year! I hope the holiday season was a pleasant one for you. As of today we are into the swing of the new year: already the bulbs at the end of the dining table — paper whites and hyacinths — have bloomed and their sharp green leaves are an augury of spring; my [...]

It’s Boxing Day, a perfect day for slothing on the sofa and succumbing to the magic world of the movies. I’ve noted before that I think this period of Neptune in Pisces (2011-2024) should be great for the moving image. One thing that’s already clear is that we’re going [...]

St Nicholas liked to leave coins in people’s shoes — apparently. It’s his saint’s day today, December 6, right in the middle of Sagittarius, the sign which is solely ruled by Jupiter, and it’s hard not to see a bit, OK quite a lot, of Jupiter, in the legend of St [...]

Only three weeks until Saturn turns his back on Scorpio. But this last sprint to the finish will see Saturn making some last ditch changes to the Scorpionic chapter. It’s been quite a transit. Saturn’s been there since 2012. And it does seem to have had some powerful effects on the [...]

You are familiar with the story of Sleeping Beauty, so familiar that the horror of it has ceased to horrify. This is the story of a baby, born perfect, sentenced to death. She is cursed in the cradle by a vengeful fairy to die at 16. Only by the actions of a good fairy is her […]

The Sea Before dreams (or terror) invented mythologies and cosmogonies, before time was parceled into days, the sea, the eternal sea, was already here. Who is the sea? Who is that violent and ancient being that gnaws at the pillars of the earth and is one and many seas and abyss and brilliancy [...]

O I FORBID you, maidens a’, That wear gowd on your hair, To come or gae by Carterhaugh, For young Tam Lin is there. There’s nane that gaes by Carterhaugh But they leave him a wad, Either their rings, or green mantles, Or else their maidenhead. Janet has kilted her green kirtle A little aboon [...]

I’ve often thought that Bill Clinton looks an awful lot like an older, whiter version of the actor Will Smith.     When the planet of beauty is in her own sign of Libra, you’d expect to find some real physical beauty. In particular, you might expect to find some perfectly [...]

George Clooney, handsome, talented and famous, seems to unite some of the best blessings of existence. Amal Alamuddin, beautiful, successful, cosmopolitan and not just a top lawyer, but a human rights one! Cream at the top of the collective coffee cup. Both just so good on paper. Which one is [...]

At the Astrological Association annual chinwag a few weekends ago, the astrologer Geoffrey Cornelius, author of The Moment of Astrology, showed a chart for Islamic State, the group claiming hegemony across northern Syria and Iraq. His reasoning for this chart was convincing, (the founding of [...]

Walk into Libra’s garden, the seventh house of the chart, and you will find yourself in a bower of sweet scented roses, treading on forget-me-nots, violas, love-in-the-mist. You might stroll down a lover’s walk through dripping wisteria to a summerhouse by a romantic lake. The [...]

Today the Sun, the heart of of our solar system, moves into the seventh sign – Libra. We are still, of course, in the ancient seventh month — September. So pour yourself a glass of 7-Up, kick off your seven-league boots, switch off symphony number seven and align your seven chakras. [...]

    Anthony Hopkins’ trademark is intense stillness broken by an electrifying stream of words, or a sudden violent movement, or a flash of those unsettling pale eyes. He was born in the dark of winter. His powerful, stony Capricorn Sun is buried in the 12th house – the [...]