What beautiful alignments we have in the coming week. By July 1, Jupiter and Venus join together in Leo, and the Cancer Sun trines Neptune in Pisces. The change in mood starts now as the Sun moves into watery nostalgic Cancer, followed by Mars on June 24. Venus and Jupiter together spell [...]

Three married sisters from Bradford — in their early thirties and with nine children between them — have run away to join ISIS in Syria. The British media has twisted itself into a pretzel trying to fit this story into a palatable narrative. The women were [...]

The rulers of Olympus, Jupiter and Juno will be exactly conjunct on May 17 at 14° Leo. This puts the royal couple in the royal sign together for the first time since 1966. But already they are just a few degrees apart. This is a very significant energy throughout May and into June that will [...]

To travel from Eritrea or Gambia across the desert to the lower lid of the Mediterranean Sea — braving torture, slavery, asphyxia in the back of a truck, rape and beatings —  to cross in an open boat: this is a hero’s journey. Imagine doing it as a child. So far this week [...]

I don’t normally write about myself, as you know, but a couple of days ago, two things happened in quick succession. First of all I got a really big check in the post. This was for some portraits that I had drawn last year. I’d not gotten around to invoicing for them, so the check [...]

The astrology of the coming weeks promises high drama, epic sweep and lasting impact. No one is likely to get away unmoved: some of us will go up and some of us will go down, some of us will watch it on TV. There will be endings, but there will also be music and sweet […]

The New Moon in a few hours falls in the last minute of the last degree of Aquarius, the sign of the waterbearer, but the Moon certainly continues to be New as it slides into the ocean of Pisces. Something ends, something begins. This is a threshold Moon. A potential-filled moment. Both [...]

There’s a big fat passionate Leo Moon out there, and with Venus, Mars and Neptune all in Pisces the air is singing with romance and yearning. Let’s face the music… There are so many great interpretations of this song: from wistful (Diana Krall, Scorpio) to [...]

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 […]

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 [...]

  The charmed quincunx between Jupiter and Neptune continues this week but now it’s graced by the presence of Venus, the goddess of love herself. Please read this piece for more on the quincunx. Jupiter is at 6/7° Leo. Venus joins him there today and for the rest of this week. [...]

I am sitting at a desk in a high-ceilinged room in Brighton. The tall window frames blue, at the lower edge lavender blossom and then a few inches above, the horizontal of prussian blue sea meeting pale, brilliant summer sky. In the distance, the sounds of church bells, surf, cars’ [...]

To one with faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible. Thomas Aquinas St Thomas Aquinas was not talking about belonging to a particular religion, since in his day — 13th century Italy — he could assume that his readers were inside the same [...]

The New Moon tomorrow at the very start of Jupiter’s journey through the sign of the Lion is enormously potent. You may see yet more action geopolitically, because on the very same day Mars finally moves out of Libra and into his own sign of Scorpio. This could be quite dangerous, even [...]

If you remember the end of A Hard Day’s Night, you’ll have some idea of what to expect from this Full Moon. The film follows The Beatles for the 36 hours leading up to a live performance in 1964. The final sequence of the film is the concert. The camera cuts back and forth between [...]

Already, you are mine. Rest with your dream inside my dream. Love, grief, labour, must sleep now. Night revolves on invisible wheels and joined to me you are pure as sleeping amber. No one else will sleep with my dream, love. You will go, we will go joined by the waters of time. No other […]

“…Syrians and Iraqis are both trapped between dictators on the one hand and extremists on the other. An unhappy choice.” from today’s Economist on-line. Yes, that sounds like the situation for a lot of people — more or less — caught in the crossfire of the [...]

I went for a run the other morning, starting through the University Parks — orderly paths thick with joggers and dog-walkers, an arboretum of specimen trees, a lily-pad spattered pond, smooth green playing fields — and crossed over the River Cherwell to run through the [...]

We all know it’s been a right old spring so far, or should that be a rite of spring (a ballet which ends with a ritual sacrifice)? With Jupiter in Cancer, emotions have been huge, billowing things, like overfilled water balloons leaking all over the place. Then there were the eclipses in [...]

“There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures.” — […]