I wrote to my friend Anton D’Abreu recently pointing out that the chart for the European Union was under a great deal of pressure during this Mars transit. Later this summer, Mars will station direct at 23° Scorpio nearly conjunct the EU Mars-Pluto conjunction. The Mars-Pluto conjunction [...]

“I want these crimes to be made public”, leaker “John Doe” to the Süddeutsche Zeitung. It turns out that very rich people have been hiding their money in secret bank accounts abroad. Why do they feel the need to do this? Either a) because the money is stolen or b) because they are avoiding [...]

Imagine a time when the Thames was the busiest highway in London, and the king’s barge a most glorious water-borne rolls-royce of golden curlicues. What could be a lovelier accompaniment to a balmy summer evening bobbing along the river than music wafting across the water. King George I [...]

I got excited a while ago when I noticed that Brazilian premier Dilma Rousseff, Ukraine’s ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and Korean PM Park Geun-hye all have Venus in Capricorn, the sign of earthly power. I wondered if there would be more women at the top of the political tree with [...]

Here we are at the dawn of the Year of the Fire Monkey and already the results of the New Hampshire Primary in the United States are telling us that this could well be the year of maverick. In Chinese astrology, the Monkey is just what you’d expect — clever, quick, a trickster, a [...]

The city of Flint, Michigan has been poisoned by bad governance. That’s not a metaphor: it is literally true. Flint, located between two of the greatest freshwater lakes on the planet, is an old industrial town, ravaged like its big neighbour Detroit by post-industrial decline. Because [...]

In the early hours of 2016, more than a 100 women were sexually assaulted by roaming gangs of men in the streets of the German city of Cologne. At least one was raped. At least 1000 men are said to have been involved in the organised attacks. It took five days for the media to catch […]

Last night, the UK Parliament voted in favour of bombing ISIS in Syria (10.16pm, December 2, London.). And in so doing they showed what democracy is about. There were passionate, well-argued speeches on both sides  — but not by either leader. Both Cameron and Corbyn seemed lightweight [...]

Canadians, it seems, have thrown out old and cold Saturn in favour of Apollo himself, the god of light. In other words, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal party trounced Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. Harper was older, colder, stiffer and meaner. Trudeau’s approach to politics? [...]

The movement of the outer planets, Pluto, Neptune and Uranus, is generational. In particular, Pluto’s movement is slow enough — it takes about 15 years to get through a sign — to give us a wide cohort. Pluto tells us what is powerful, what is transformed, what is lost. [...]

If you didn’t believe in the power of astrological symbols before, you should now. The chart I use for the Republic of Turkey is set for the declaration of the Turkish Republic in 1923, absurdly recent for a country with such a long history, but as you can see from the transits to the [...]

The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia has this to say about more than 700 people being crushed to death at Mina during the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj: “As for the things that humans cannot control, you are not blamed for them. Fate and destiny are inevitable.” Fate and destiny are by [...]

The warrior queen Zenobia passed under that Zodiac dozens, maybe hundreds, of times. By the start of her reign in the 3rd century BC, the Temple of Bel in Palmyra was already 200 years old. Its fabulous portico with the seven planets personified, surrounded by the signs of the Zodiac, would [...]

Jupiter in Virgo opposition Neptune in Pisces — September 17 Readers of the horoscope will know that the coming opposition between Jupiter and Neptune is the most important aspect this month, influencing this entire period into the next season and possibly the whole year.  For some [...]

According to the on-line Oxford English Dictionary a migrant is “A worker who moves from place to place to do seasonal work.” A refugee is “A person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster:” It’s a [...]

Of course it’s one thing to look at Jeremy Corbyn’s chart. He is clearly having a high old time, but we really ought to look at the chart of the Labour Party to get an idea of what’s going on. I asked my friend Liz, who is a fount of natal charts, what she had […]

The wave of left-wing emotion that’s swept through Europe from Greece to Spain and Italy has finally found a focus on these islands in the unlikely person of Jeremy Corbyn, a softly spoken Labour backbencher. It’s been a feeling in search of a leader. Corbyn is a slight, earnest, [...]

Just a quick note here, but sometimes you just couldn’t make the astrology up: it’s so simple. US President Barack Obama is visiting Kenya the birthplace of his father for the first time in his presidency. The astrology? Saturn, the planet associated with the father (along with the [...]

The Heraklean Way, one of the most ancient routes in Europe, runs from the Sacred Promontory on the Atlantic coast of Portugal to the Matrona Pass in the Alps. It’s both a real road – you can still drive along parts of it today – and a mythical one, for it is said that the […]

My fellow blogging astrologer, Mitch Lopate, moved to China in March to teach at a business school. I asked him to send us the occasional pithy little anecdote to show us how his Western astrology is being received over there. He writes: So I’ve been teaching freshman English Reading [...]