Eurasian shaman, early 20th century from a Russian ethnographic collection. “Sometimes a wild god comes to the table. He is awkward and does not know the ways Of porcelain, of fork and mustard and silver. His voice makes vinegar from wine. “When the wild god arrives at the door, [...]

Winter Afternoon — Yuli Yulievich Klever — It’s just after four in the afternoon and night already. Daylight went in a blinking here in the deep of the year. Tomorrow the Sun moves into Capricorn, Saturn’s sign; the sign of responsibility, of the father, of old age [...]

Gravity opens with the longest, loveliest view of our pearlescent planet, so large and luminous — and behind it black space. The Earth is our home, our heart, our mother — but what happens when we cut the cord that ties us to her? (Spoiler alert. Pretty much all is revealed.) Dr [...]

Are these the 12 faces of Chiron — or just a bunch of actors in funny clothes? If you want to get a handle on a certain well known asteroid/planetoid/…er… comet… er … thingie whizzing around between Saturn and Uranus right now, then you might do well to watch a [...]

Hygeia by Gustav Klimt Imagine that you are a citizen of Ephesus. The time is just over a two thousand years ago. You’re rather well off and everything in your life is just super — except that you get these terrible headaches every now and then. So you decide to try a cure across [...]

The Return of Persephone by Frederick Leighton. Wikimedia Commons. Golden-bright Persephone, Demeter’s beautiful daughter, was picking flowers one day in the wide, scented valley of Enna in Sicily when Hades, the prince of hell, burst out of the ground and grabbed her and pulled her down [...]

Mother Rose and her baby. Mary Cassatt (Ceres conjunct MC in Scorpio) who became famous for her intensely emotional pictures of the mother-child bond Wikimedia Commons. To caress the soft downy scalp of a baby, her head small enough to cradle in the palm of your hand, her hands like [...]

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 [...]

Lévi- Strauss’s seminal book La Pensee Sauvage is translated into English as the Savage Mind, which is not quite right, of course, and sounds vaguely pejorative. Sauvage means wild, as in the opposite of domesticated. Pensée is thought. So you could read this more as Untamed Thinking. [...]

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 [...]

Yesterday Angelina Jolie told the world she’d had an operation that reduces her risk of cancer from 87% to 5%. She’d had a double mastectomy. That one of the world’s most beautiful women should choose to have both breasts removed is a powerful notion. Jolie in particular has [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Jodie Foster is one of the few movie stars who has managed to transmute her juvenile brilliance into adult excellence. Now, she’s 50 and still at the top of her profession. It’s a remarkable career. But just as remarkable has been her determination to keep her private life out of [...]

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 [...]

In the Northern Hemisphere, nature is sleeping. The leaves have fallen and the ground is frost-hard. Here at England’s navel, dusk is at 4pm. The dark is rising outside my window. Today the Sun moved into the sign of the strange goatfish, Capricorn, ruled by cold Saturn. Capricorn is the [...]

Neptune in Pisces – right at the beginning again. Chiron, the wounded healer, in Pisces too. Both planets have turned direct this week. If you need to cry, let your tears flow. It is part of the healing. Listen to kd lang (Sun conjunct Neptune, Chiron in Pisces) and Roy Orbison (Chiron-Moon [...]

Gadgets, car chases, kiss kiss, bang, bang. Was there ever a deeper examination of the modern condition than James Bond? Just kidding. A Bond film is about wallowing in style over substance, stuff over emotions, materialism over spirituality. Ian Fleming: debonair For this country, of course, [...]

The boy hero was educated by Chiron, the centaur. Here depicted by John Singer Sargent Silver-footed Thetis, the sea goddess, leaned over the the River Styx, and dipped her demigod baby into its dark current. The magical water made the boy invulnerable. But there was one spot that stayed dry – [...]

You’re nothing but a pack of cards. One of the cleverest and most enchanting heroines in all literature was born on a sultry afternoon 160 years ago on the banks of the River Isis right here in Oxford. It was the 4th of July, 1862. Charles Dodgson rowed up the river with his friend the [...]