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 [...]

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 [...]

Benedict XVI steps down tomorrow Pope Benedict XVI has the chart of a true “Prince of the Church“. He has the two planets of power, Saturn and Jupiter,  near the axes of his chart. This is something you see in royalty, people born to rule. In the case of the Pope, Jupiter is in the [...]

Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln. Sitting in a darkened cinema and watching Daniel Day-Lewis filling up and spilling out of the screen is a pleasure: sometimes terrifying, sometimes heartbreaking, always visceral. He’s an actor who gets right into your guts. There’s no time of [...]

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 [...]

Spanish does not have to be your first language if you want to make it in Hollywood, you’re a man and your Sun is in Pisces. But maybe it helps… Javier Bardem (March 1, 1969) Benicio del Toro (Feb 19, 1967) Raul Julia (Mar 9, 1940) Just wondering…

Nuns in St Peter’s Square, Ash Wednesday 2013. On Ash Wednesday several thousand people queued around St Peter’s Square in the slanting afternoon sun. Above pulsed the blue dome of the a perfect Roman sky, ahead the pearly dome of the St Peter’s, mother church reaching out [...]

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 [...]

Jodie Foster is one of the few movie stars who has managed to transmute her juvenile brilliance into adult excellence. Now, she’s 50 and still at the top of her profession. It’s a remarkable career. But just as remarkable has been her determination to keep her private life out of [...]

It all started with this picture. The sculpture’s called Spring and I thought it was a pretty good representation of Lilith conjunct Sun in Capricorn. Lilith is, of course, all that is unmentionable and dark about the feminine. She is, among other things, the vagina dentata. I believe [...]

Plaintive, beautiful, broken, nostalgic. David Bowie’s new single Where Are We Now?, released today, is a return to his Berlin years both lyrically and musically. Bowie’s 66th birthday is today – maybe a good moment to recall those times in Berlin (1976-1979) when he produced some [...]

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 [...]

Detail from Rubens’  Adoration of the Magi (or astrologers as we like to call them) May peace, good cheer and love fill your heart this Christmas. I won’t  be posting until January. Horoscopes should be here on New Year’s Day.The Uranus-Pluto square is quite active [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

With his customary impeccable timing (Saturn in Virgo), jazzman Dave Brubeckwas died yesterday, just two days short of his 92nd birthday. But today is his actual Solar Return, the moment in the year the Sun returns to the place it was when you were born. The planets of ending and [...]

Through grey mist a ship of fools floats out to sea under the Golden Gate Bridge. The year is 1950, exactly half way through the “American Century”. Much has been written about Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film The Master. It’s a warp and weft of images, sounds and words [...]

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 [...]

Black Iris III The American painter, Georgia O’Keeffe, was an über-Scorp, with Sun, Moon, Jupiter and Mercury all in the sign that rules – among other things – dissection and sexuality.  Her bold studies of irises show how such things can be beautiful. Like some other Scorpio artists – [...]

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, [...]