I’ve just re-read last year’s Gemini self-portraits piece again and it made me smile. Take a look and enjoy how surprisingly alike some of the artists look, right down to the facial hair and the rebel attitude. To see the whole piece click here. Main pic: Diego Velazquez, born June [...]

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 [...]

It was the spring of 1975, when a willowy black woman from Boston and a diminutive German-speaking Italian got together in a music studio in Bavaria and unleashed the most famous series of female orgasms in pop music.  When Donna Summer came for 17 minutes into a microphone and Giorgio Moroder [...]

“The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another, his mother called him wild thing and Max said, “I’ll eat you up!” so he was sent to bed without eating anything.” Maurice Sendak’s short masterpiece Where The Wild Things Are is a [...]

A while ago I was asked to talk about astrology to some teenagers at the Museum of the History of Science here in Oxford. For  a bit of fun, I asked them each to fill out a short questionnaire. They were to choose three words to describe themselves from a list of different character traits. [...]

Munch’s Madonna. He had Lilith in Cancer opposite the feminine Moon in her fall. “Oh, Mother, my mother!” cried the agonized girl, turning passionately upon her parent as if her poor heart would break. “How could I be expected to know? I was a child when I left this house four [...]

In my last post I pointed out that the extraordinarily brilliant writer Patricia Highsmith had dark, disturbing Lilith conjunct her Mercury, the planet of mind and writing. One of the things that makes her writing so remarkable is her ability to get under the skin of evil. Her greatest [...]

Joan Crawford. picture by George Hurrell Lilith – baby-strangler, seducer, mistress of secret knowledge, outsider, feminist icon — Black Moon. In Jewish folklore, she is Adam’s first wife. But her roots are much older – an Assyrian she-demon, a serpent goddess, queen of the underworld. [...]

Can you guess this man’s sign? Let me give you some clues. His black shirt and his shaved head, his solitude and his silences, his solo morning swim in the sea. His job: he is a police detective. His love life: messy. Have you guessed yet? You’ll laugh when you look at the chart. [...]

Click here for to read my piece on Aries self portraits published here last April.

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 [...]

Daydreaming by DG Rossetti I think it’s time I drew your attention to a piece I wrote about Neptune in Pisces and the Pre-Raphaelites. The astrology is pretty exact. Click here to read it.

Is this the most influential portrait of a woman from the 20th century? You wouldn’t believe it now, but way back in 1991, this cover of Vanity Fair showing the then highest-earning actress in Hollywood naked and heavily pregnant caused a storm of controversy. Why? Because some people [...]

This cover was designed by Len Deighton in the late 50s. If Jack Kerouac had not drunk himself to death at the age of 47, he would have turned 90 on March 12 this year. He was in many ways the perfect Pisces author – a drunken, dreaming mystic visionary who seemed to just spew out his […]

Pablo Picasso loved the virile masculinity of the bull – the cojones. He painted and drew and modelled and made hundreds of bulls. It’s well known that he especially identified himself with the Minotaur, the mythical monster half-man, half bull: tender and bestial. So, astrologically [...]

Titania (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Bottom (Kevin Kline) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream My friend J has great big, baby blue eyes. They’re beautiful. She comes across as a little flaky, vague, kind, not quite of this world, when she walks along, these days in a kaftan likely as not, she [...]

Nude by Francis Cadell. “There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.” – Ralph Ellison, Born March 1, 1913 Sun in Pisces, Mercury in [...]

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 [...]

Lawrence Alma-Tadema (8 Jan) painted this self-portrait when he was 16. During his lifetime, he was one of the richest, most sought-after painters of his day, creating vast fantasies of Roman decadence and fairyland luxury. His charm lay in the way his people looked so real – and yet there [...]

Tiger Mom: me me me As an indulgent, child-worshipping Western mother, the Tiger Mom thing really gets up my nose. In case you missed it, (which I’m sure you didn’t), last year a law professor at Yale published a book explaining how she was a brilliant mother as well as a [...]