… and on the subject of great American poets, it’s Walt Whitman’s birthday today. What a marvellous expression of the joyful Gemini soul. This is from the beginning of Leaves of Grass. Come, said my soul, Such verses for my Body let us write, (for we are one,) That should I [...]
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Book reviews, author profiles through the lens of astrology.
The Luminaries
What would happen if you pieced a story together from 12 different points of view, using each of the Zodiac signs? For a start you’d end up with a great big doorstop of a book even if half of it was simply a dissection of one day. And you’d also end up with more in-depth […]
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Mars In Libra In His Own Words
War (1924) by Otto Dix, who had Mars in Libra and turned his experience of battle into art Planets traditionally have signs which they love or hate, where they are comfortable or uncomfortable. The assignment of these rulerships happened a long time ago though — in another time and [...]
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Writers, Writing And Astrology
Jack Kerouac: Moon in Virgo, Asc Virgo, Pisces Sun With Mercury still retrograde for a few more days, here is a reminder of some of the posts about authors on the OA… Witty and wonderful Jane Austen Cerebral and fantastic JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis Scary and spooky Mary Shelley and Bram [...]
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Creating A Library: Beginner Books
Attentive Reading by Gustave Jean Jacquet. (Wiki) First of all: thank you everyone for writing in with your brilliant book suggestions. Two big gaps in my library have already been filled. I have just finished Richard Idemon’s Through The Looking Glass (how could I not have read this [...]
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Creating Your Library: Astrology Books
The Green Dress. Elanor Colburn. “You must read this book,” said my friend G, handing me a skinny paperback. She was a full year older than me, an Aquarian, and at that age, a year really counted. Well, I haven’t seen G in decades, but that skinny paperback has travelled with [...]
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Venus in Capricorn: Beautiful Bones
Scarlett Johansson. Sun in Sag. Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Cap Venus is a about money and love and beauty. Her natal placement tells us about all those things. It tells us about how we love, what we love and what makes us loveable. Venus is also about seduction. How we are attractive, whom [...]
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Astrologer Wins Top Literary Prize
Oh how we love Eleanor Catton, winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Her massive historical novel The Luminaries boggled the judges minds. How did she structure it? Using proper, grown up astrology. Twelve characters are based on the signs of the Zodiac, and seven on the [...]
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Virgo New Moon: Time To Get Clarity
God or, more correctly, G-d opened the Book of Life on Wednesday, the first day of Rosh Hoshanah, and will be snapping it shut again next Friday, September 13. During these ten Days of Awe, he’s going to be watching you, taking notes and making a decision about your coming year. You have [...]
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Lilith, the Rebel Soul: “Drink Stars And Ask For The Moon”
Mother Ayahuasca Image source unknown. If you know who this is by, tell me. “I was looking for the will of the wild. I was looking for how that will expressed itself in elemental vitality, in savage grace. Wildness is resolute for life: it cannot be otherwise; for it will die in [...]
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Unpacking My Library: Reading Pisces (with Mercury Retrograde)
The Reader by Federico Faruffini. I found this on the wonderful blog Reading and Art. “I awoke one morning with the usual perplexity of mind which accompanies the return of consciousness. As I lay and looked through the eastern window of my room, a faint streak of peach-colour, dividing [...]
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Jane Austen: Details, Wit and Planets in Detriment
Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle putting the sex into P&P It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is [...]
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Homage to the Creator of The Hobbit et al
Bilbo Baggins first wriggled his furry little toes just down the road from here. So I often think of that notoriously shy scholar John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and his vast imagination after I’ve dropped my children off at school, when I walk (or currently crutch) past his old house. The [...]
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The Inception of Monsters: Frankenstein and Dracula
Bela Lugosi as … Lilith? 1816: they called it the summer there was no summer. In the Swiss Alps, the cold was bitter even in June. Huddled under the stormy cloak cast by the unseasonable weather, a band of young English travellers passed the time with talking, fantasising, [...]
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Why Britain Loves Bond
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, [...]
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The Fabulous Chart of Alice in Wonderland
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 [...]
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For All You Trekkies Out There: Part Three
My colleague Jackie Taylor has allowed me to publish her clever piece about Star Trek, which originally appeared in The Astrological Journal. This is the third tranche. To read the first part about Star Trek’s (rather inauspicious) beginnings, click here, and the second about Leonard [...]
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When The Past Comes To Life
Thomas Cromwell: fixer, strategist, statesman – Scorpio. Hans Holbein King Henry VIII – charmer, playboy, wife-killer and the first head of the Church of England – had an axe-man, Thomas Cromwell, whose job it was to facilitate the King’s desires – divorce, dissolution, beheadings, [...]
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50 Shades of Hades
Just in case you’ve missed it, 50 Shades of Grey is a story about a young woman who meets an insanely wealthy, mysterious, tortured but alluring older man. They have a passionate affair during which she discovers herself as a sexual being – and his tough facade is penetrated by her sheer [...]
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Unpacking My Library: The Artist’s Way
Most self-help books have about three ideas in them which are padded out with a lot of white space and bullet points. But there are a few which are absolutely brilliant. Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way has sold about a gazillion copies in the two decades not because it’s [...]
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