Jean Seberg in A Bout de Souffle (1960). Sweet and sexy. Scorpio Sun, Venus in Sag. I’ve been looking at loads of pictures of actors with the planet of attraction in the sign of the centaur – and I have to say the stand out quality which they all share is sex appeal. Gerard Depardieu, [...]

In Blue. Wassily Kandinsky: Saturn in Scorpio, Venus in Sagittarius The weather changed yesterday and a dry, icy wind sent tiny clouds fleeting across the sky, trees rattling and swaying, branches to the floor, drifts of leaves whirling up like spirits. Autumn had arrived overnight. Today, [...]

Peter Higgs, Emeritus Professor of Physics at Edinburgh, was – finally – awarded the Nobel Prize yesterday. It was entirely expected, since his hypothesis – that there’s a subatomic particle called a boson – was finally proved correct in a (rather large) [...]

Prometheus by Andre Durand. Srelton: Uranian Is there a gay planet? Not really, but perhaps for obvious reasons, the planet of revolution, eccentricity and difference, Uranus, often makes itself powerfully felt in the natal charts of gay people. Some famous singing examples are Elton John with [...]

Prometheus, Nicolas-Sebastien Adam. Prometheus, the rebel god, stole fire from heaven and brought it to the human race. This made Zeus, king of the gods, cross, because fire was one of the gods’ secrets, along with lightning and thunder and stuff. According to some versions of the story, [...]

Beatles fans in the 1960s. Uranus conjunct Pluto. Neptune in Scorpio. “Madness,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, “is the exception in individuals, but the rule in groups.” That would explain why psychopaths rise to the top then. The rest of us mill around being all [...]

Venus at her Mirror, Velazquez. Today and this week, the planet of beauty, art and peace, Venus, looks into a mirror that magnifies her image: that is Neptune her big blue brother swirling through the outer solar system. Venus is activating the water grand trine that connects Saturn (making [...]

Sea Nettle jellyfish. Photo by Fred Hsu from Wikimedia Commons. I have just been attempting to write a post inspired by the following aphorism. “Madness is the exception in individuals; the rule in groups.” On the whole, I think Nietzsche had a point. Yet, the more you think about [...]

This terrific self-portrait dates from 1927. Just as a supplement to the Satie piece: here is Suzanne Valadon’s chart. She was a wonderful woman, a free spirit, single mother, great painter and an inspiration for many other artists (Neptune in the 7th), in particular Renoir. For a while [...]

D likes to mooch around the local junk market on Thursdays. Today he came home with an old record player. We are spinning discs that have been in storage for – ahem – decades this afternoon. Perfect on a sunny evening with Mercury retrograding through the sign of nostalgia, [...]

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 [...]