Shade and Darkness – The Evening before the Deluge. JMW Turner 1843 A wall of water ripped through inland Australia tearing up trees, tossing cars and buses like flotsam, swamping houses and taking lives. Today hundreds of Brazilians died in muddy landslides caused by torrents of rain. In [...]

Jules et Jim (1962). Ghosts from long ago summers. This is a true story, but it’s a little off the wall, so bear with me. I had a kind of waking dream the night before last in which the ghost of an old, old boyfriend came and spoke to me. Now in real life I […]

I want a William and Kate souvenir toothpick, please. I received an email a while ago asking me to look at the chart of Catherine Middleton, who is to marry the heir to the British throne, Prince William, in April. Well, her birthday’s on the 9th of January, so why not look at it today [...]

  Captain Beefheart (far right) and the long-suffering Magic Band, back in 1969. A creative visionary died this week. Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart) (born January 15, 1941 at 4.25pm) was a legendary avant-garde musician and performer and a damn fine painter. In both his chosen [...]

  Mercury back through Sag means review the map of your life – or plan to take a trip that you’ve taken before. So last week, I found myself watching the first series of the West Wing, which wasn’t a bad way to enjoy the messenger planet’s review of the sign of [...]

Riot police in Parliament Square.* The god Pluto wears a helmet of invisibility. Are you enjoying the ferocious fisticuffs between Mercury, Mars and Pluto? Speedy Mercury is thought and words and youth; Mars is war and action; Pluto – well, he comes like a shadow in the night, carries a big [...]

Death and Life, Gustav Klimt 1911. Death catches up with us all – but in what guise. As a virus? A car crash? Will it come slowly or will it be sudden? Are our days numbered from the moment we are born? Medieval astrologers certainly believed they could foretell the hour of your death. The [...]

Take a leaf out of Rodin’s notebook and have a little think. Here’s one of the simplest ways to use astrology: work with the energy of the retrogrades. So hurray, Mercury retrograde is here again, so it’s time to re-think, re-evaluate, review and renegotiate. This time [...]

So it’s been seven years – May 2003 to be exact. What a lot has changed since Uranus, the planet of future forward, went into the final sign of the Zodiac, Pisces. Courreges, 1960s. Well, that was when we thought the future was shiny.Uranus was in Virgo, opposite where it is now. Seven [...]

  We had a flying visit from our Indian friend this week with whom I had our usual discussion about things astrological.   We soon got around to the subject of that great big ring.   What ring? The engagement ring Prince William gave Kate Middleton. It’s a large sapphire surrounded by [...]

Poster  for the 2004 Korean blockbuster, The Brotherhood of War. So South Korea is a successful, entrepreneurial (if rather corrupt) Leo Sun and North Korea is an angst-ridden, self-hating Virgo. Sibling rivalry is rarely this toxic. The two countries were born just a few weeks apart on the 15 [...]

Beware of astrologers projecting their stuff onto you. Here’s what happened to me the other day. I go to various astrologers’ groups. Obviously, it’s important  to do this in order to talk about work, keep up-to-date with new ideas and exchange insights. Usually, the meetings [...]

Steel Orchid. She stands, tiny and fragile behind the iron fence, then graciously she accepts the gift of a flower and puts it in her hair. The people of Burma are cursed to have such terrible governance, but blessed with such a leader. Aung San Suu Kyi is indomitable, indefatigable, brave, [...]

Ophelia by John Everett Millais. We’ve been deep in the dark waters of Scorpio lately. You may have been diving for pearls, but sometimes it gets quite hard to breathe down there – all that psychodrama can be suffocating. Breathe easy now. Venus slipped backwards out of Scorpio and into [...]

Hokusai’s Great Wave print (1831). Watch the wave. Water is pulled up into its belly. Some pushed forward from the ocean and some sucked backwards, pulled against the tide, across sand and shingle. The energy gathers. The wave grows – higher, stronger, faster – for a moment it seems to [...]

Prometheus, the revolutionary fire-stealing Titan whom historian Richard Tarnas argues should be associated with the planet Uranus. I agree with him Uranus has navigated the Piscean ocean with panache over the pat seven years, making waves in all kinds of directions. At the same time, [...]

Here in Oxford, we are having an extraordinarily beautiful autumn. The leaves are lambent red and gold, yellow and bright green. The air is very still, slightly damp and shining. It is unusually warm, so the light is not crisp and sharp, but gleaming. In short it is like a dream. I cycled back [...]

A Man and A Woman (1966) Venus is the planet of love and money; two things it’s good to at least try and get right. And two ways in which we fall into horrible, relentlessly repeating patterns. After a certain time, we can look back at our lives and discern these themes and variations [...]

As you know, there are seven heavenly bodies in traditional astrology. The boys – Sun, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The girls – Moon, Venus. Five against two. Now does that seem fair to you? Does that even seem like life? Ceres, goddess of fertility, is sometimes assigned to [...]

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. George Osborne is going to be one of the most hated public figures of our time. But he can take it This afternoon George Osborne, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, gave the most important speech of his life – and maybe ours. Is this a full [...]