Death Archives - The Oxford Astrologer

Category: Death

Astrology as Enchantment

“You are the universe in ecstatic motion.” — Rumi At Iftar a couple of days ago, I found myself sitting next to an Anglican vicar. As we waited to eat our dates, we talked about god and vocation, and astrology as enchantment. She told me that a decade ago, she’d had a [...]

Pluto in Aquarius: Connect or Disconnect

This year’s great cosmic shift — the move of Pluto into Aquarius — has already caused much hammering of keyboards, bursting of brain cells and copious words to be spilled across the internet. Here’s what you need to know. • Pluto will be in Aquarius from 20 January [...]

About The Queen’s Passing

Having recently lost both my parents and both my in-laws, I know that one effect of death is to change the shape of a person’s life. Up until that point, if they have lived long, you may be thinking of them as a very old person, but a while after they die, you begin to […]

Halloween Special

The Full Moon on Halloween 2020 contains a zingy surprise. Now that may be grandma’s white teeth being a little longer and sharper than you thought, but it may be that the big bad wolf turns out to be a hirsute suitor. This is also the second Full Moon of October so gets the title of [...]

On the Death of My Father

My Dad died at around 8.30am on July 31. His passing was pleasant, I’m told. He was in his own bed, in his own house. His carer came to find him, breezily calling down the corridor, and sailing into his room. Seeing he was still supine, she said his name, he replied, “Oui”, [...]

Oh The Magnficence: Scott Walker

I sometimes feel I need to shake myself like a wet dog after listening to Scott Walker, and, maybe, watch the droplets turn into glorious rainbows, transform into hummingbirds. Two lines into a Scott Walker song and you are immersed, taken into another, magical dimension. His perfect diction, [...]

Astrology of Now: Between the Eclipses

Subscribers to the horoscopes already know that I had my own private eclipse at the end of January: my darling mother died. Here’s some of what I wrote then: “She went back to bed one morning, feeling a little odd — and never got up. Yes, she had a Leo Moon, right in the path […]

Jupiter in Scorpio: Underworlds

Within the earth, beneath the mountain, through the dark lake, there is another world. Sunlight does not penetrate. You must bring your own light. This is the realm of the dead, a place of ghosts and shades, a place of buried wealth, secrets, hidden desires. Gilgamesh, Inanna, Psyche, Demeter, [...]

Why Charlottesville?

Angry faces reddened by torchlight, mouths agape spewing hatred. The sight of those men — and they were almost all men — scarring the beautiful campus of the University of Virginia was stomach churning, horrible, familiar — even on the small screen of this laptop, You’ve seen that same anger [...]

The fourth wall of that apartment was sky — straight out west to infinity. At sunset, the colours were delirious: orange, magenta, fuchsia, red, burning in the west. And then, through dusk, subtle mauve and bruises. In the distance the planes circling to land at Heathrow blinked in the [...]

Magnified, Sanctified: Leonard Cohen

A poet, a mystic, a lover, a joker — a man. Leonard Cohen, who died last week at the age of 82, wrote complexly layered lyrics, with deceptively simple tunes. His songs coil and then unwind, as images and fragments of stories twist freely into your imagination. “There is no God in Heaven [...]

Asteroids Paint A Picture of A Modern Martyrdom

My colleague Rollan McCleary sent me this email last week, which I thought I’d share with you. This is especially for those of you interested in asteroids. “I will paste below a small piece I put out on the American Noel Tyl site and called Picture of a Modern Martyrdom. You may find you [...]

Brussels Attack

Here is the chart for the moment the first gunfire was heard at 8AM on March 22 in Brussels. Depressing. Notice the packed 12th house of secret enemies, Pluto, the ninja on the MC being trined by the Moon, which is just moving from Jupiter Retrograde (religious fanatics) to the North Node (a [...]

RIP — Thornton Dial

Wonderful, maverick, true artist Thornton Dial passed a couple of days ago at the age of 87. He had Sun in Virgo — the sign of detail and craft — Venus in Libra (artistic) conjunct Mercury. The titles of his works were important, and the works speak. Saturn was one degree [...]

Is 69 The New 27?

As you probably already know, the 27 Club is a term for all those singers who died too young, at the age of 27. The list is long and it includes, off the top of my head, Amy Winehouse, Jeff Buckley, Jimmy Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Janis Joplin. In fact there is something important [...]

The Mighty Pen, Symbol of Reason

Twelve people at the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were gunned down on January 7. In the same week, Saudi blogger Raif Badawi received the first 50 lashes of his 1000-lash sentence for blasphemy, ironically, an echo of the Charlie Hebdo cover that caused such offense in [...]

The darkest night of the year is almost upon us. The nadir, the bottom, the grave, the tomb — and the womb. We are sliding gently into this zero hour, lighting our candles and fireworks to keep away the creeping shadows. Christmas is a beautiful celebration, and a deep understanding, of [...]

Astrology of Now: Soul Theft

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 […]

Not only was the news this morning sad, it was troubling, horrifying, grotesque, macabre — satanic even. I’m referring to the murder of the American hostage Abdul-Rahman Kassig and 18 unnamed Syrian troops by Islamic State. All were gruesomely killed for the camera, and the video [...]

The White Masks Of Ebola

Someone asked last week when the white-masked people were coming to fight the black-masked Islamic State killers. Maybe the answer is, they are already here; but they’re busy. Healthworkers tackling the Ebola outbreak are sheathed in plastic. The white hoods and masks they wear do make [...]