Before time began, gods emerged from chaos. Uranus, the god of the sky, made love to the earth, Gaia, every night, and from their union were born giants and Titans, both hated by their father, who, consequently, imprisoned his children in the deepest depths of the earth. One, Saturn, escaped. [...]

Port Meadow, Oxford, yesterday, February 16 I started to write this post in the middle of the Full Moon storm, so it’s slightly out of synch with the weather now – three days later. But I have left the words as they are because I think it works with the current slightly confused [...]

Vasilisa in the Wood, Ivan Bilibin (1899). Vasilisa the Beautiful escaped from the child-eating witch of the deep, dark forest Baba Yaga, using one of the witch’s own torches, hand-crafted, as they might say on etsy, from a human skull. Baba Yaga, a drooling hag who terrorises the [...]

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 [...]

Walter Crane imagined the beast as a boar. Once upon a time, in a country rather like this one, not very long ago, lived a young woman called Belle… Anne Anderson imagined a sort of beaky beast The first written version of Beauty and the Beast comes from mid-18th century France, but such [...]

Well, Mercury has begun his long walk out of the Underworld. Today he is at 2° Scorpio — only another 28° to go. It’s was a powerful retrograde, as you might expect when the planet of mind goes through the sign of depth psychology. Of course, Mercury is still in Scorpio until the [...]

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, [...]

The Neighborhood Bully – John George Brown Politics just go nasty again in the UK. Let me explain. In this country, there’s a “Leader of the Opposition” in parliament who is the head of the main party that’s out of office, and whose job it is to question the [...]

A very unusual pattern is forming in the sky this morning. It’s called a Star of David, because it’s made up of two almost perfectly intersecting Grand Trines. You can see it in the image here. This is an Earth-Water Star, which should already give you an idea of the combination of practical [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Low tide Cornwall, high noon. As the tide pulls away from the shore, a wondrous world of rock pools is revealed. Anemones, starfish, crabs. Slippery seaweed. Broken fishing nets, plastic bottles, a locked box, a glove. Detritus along the high tide mark. A dead crab. Thousands of glistening [...]

Ribbons on a maypole Whenever I sit down and talk to someone about a chart, it strikes me afresh just how interesting and unexpected people’s stories are. Everyone’s life is not just one story but a whole necklace of tales threaded together by one soul. Those tales, of course, [...]

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 [...]

This week is going to be a firecracker, as the Sun, Mars, Venus cluster around unpredictable Uranus in Aries, the touchpaper sign.  The Moon is already involved with this, making a quincunx aspect to that pack of planets shortly, which creates a Yod with Saturn in Scorpio. This is all [...]

The Sun is in the last degree of Pisces today, just about to POP into Aries like a bubble bursting out of water. It will be at 0° Aries at 11.01AM  tomorrow, March 20th. That marks the start of the new year for the Zodiac. In particular, this is a moment to leave behind emotional (or […]

Blue, Green and Brown by Mark Rothko I do wonder how much astrology is used in the Vatican. The timing of Benedcit XVI’s resignation and then the papal conclave that starts today, on the day of the Pisces New Moon, is perfect. This Pisces energy is well-used in prayer, contemplation and [...]