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. [...]

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 [...]

Narcissus (detail) John William Waterhouse. When the hunter Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection, he was looking into a pool of water. Self-love is so much easier these days: we have mirrors. Even 200 years ago, if you were an ordinary person you might have seen your reflection in a [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Prometheus, Nicolas-Sebastien Adam. Prometheus, the rebel god, stole fire from heaven and brought it to the human race. This made Zeus, king of the gods, cross, because fire was one of the gods’ secrets, along with lightning and thunder and stuff. According to some versions of the story, [...]

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. [...]

Halvor kills the troll in Soria Moria Castle. “My name is Amanda Berry.” The first words she spoke after she crawled out of the house of her enslavement in Cleveland, Ohio were a statement of her identity. Amanda Berry is much more than what happened to her. Her decade-long [...]

Mami Wata 1999, by Moyo Ogundipe   It’s Mothering Sunday here. The Moon (Mama) is in the sign of the Fishes, coming up to conjunct the Sun in a day or so. Mama Wata, Yemanya, La Sirene — these are all names for the mother of the ocean worshipped in West Africa, Brazil, the [...]

William Blake: Seven Spririts of God. Now he had some really funny ideas. Whenever we receive wisdom that’s come down through many centuries, we can be certain that it has lost half its original bodyweight, accrued an encrustation of opinion, developed a strange lopsided bias, and [...]

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 [...]

A detail from Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights “Beware the slinking whisperer who whispers into the hearts of people, whether he is from the world of spirits or the world of humans.” – Sura 114, The Qur’an “The mind is its own place, and in [...]

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, [...]

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 – [...]

Lord Shiva, the transformer Today, the god of transformation is joined by the Full Moon in the sign of institutions, establishment, organisation. And the head of Barclays Bank resigns… The Moon slides over Pluto at 8° Capricorn and then opposes then Sun, which is at 12° Cancer. If you [...]

Steal away with the fairies for the next few months while Venus dances in Gemini “At the beginning of each summer, when the milk-white hawthorn is in bloom, anointing the air with its sweet odour, and miles and miles of golden whin adorn the glens and hill-slopes, the fairies come forth [...]

Princesss Elizabeth and her dashing consort Philip at a polo match in Kenya, just days before she succeeded to the throne in 1952. The 33 daughters of the Roman emperor Diocletian, cast adrift in the grey sea (after murdering their 33 dreary husbands), saw land – a white land, rising from the [...]

The ugly step-sisters flank Cinderella in last year’s panto at the Oxford Playhouse. What is it about our brothers and sisters? It’s the longest relationship for most of us. And so often it is a knot of jealousy and loyalty, love and loathing, betrayal and trust. We share a [...]

Imagine you are…Classical Lady by John William Godward OK, we are back in Rome, sometime in the 2nd century AD. It’s autumn, the grape harvest is in. We’ve all been celebrating in perhaps too Dionysian a fashion. Imagine that you are a togaed Roman with time and money on your [...]

You may have read some of my previous posts on the “tutelary deities” used by Roman astrologers. These came as a surprise to me when I read about them last year since I’d not come across them in any astrology texts or lectures that I’d attended previously. Suffice to [...]