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 [...]

Wikipedia is officially 15 today. Hooray! I love it — even though the editors are mean about astrology. If you want to find out about just about anything from Alabama to Zoroastrianism, Wiki will get you started. The secret of the site’s success is, as founder Jimmy Wales writes, [...]

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 […]

On Saturday, at 19.26 in Paris, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius brought down his gavel. Delegates from 196 countries, crammed into a debating chamber, erupted into applause. A global agreement had been reached on tackling climate change. The UN’s climate change agreement is not [...]

“I went to the consulate with a large-wide sugarcoated birthday cake upon my head with fifty flaming candles lit – I felt just so spunky and affluent! In my ear I wore sugar plums or matchboxes – I forget which. Also I had put on several stamps as beauty spots on my emerald-painted [...]

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 [...]

This is a good news story, so bear with me and see where it leads. Victims of the condition variously labelled Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) or Myalgic Encephalitis (ME) are used to being disbelieved, disrespected, and ignored. They know about being labelled liars, shirkers, fantasists. [...]

I did my first online radio/webinar interview last Sunday with Virtual Vision FM. If you would like to watch it, it’s now available on YouTube. Click here to view.

The motto of the city of Paris is Fluctuat nec migrator. It’s on the coat of arms. It means something like “tossed but not sunk”. I have nothing useful to add to what has already been said about what happened on Friday night. But I will offer you the chart for the event, [...]

My grandparents had stacks of yellow-edged National Geographics in the basement of their house, some dating from the days before photographs were on the front cover. On rainy days in summer or awkward Christmas holidays, I escaped down there, opened those shiny covers and travelled the world. [...]

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? [...]

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 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 [...]

Last week, I did a talk at Aquarius Severn which included a short picture essay. I’ll show it to you here. Remember that Neptune and Jupiter, the planets that promote flow, meet across the mutable Virgo-Pisces axis once a century. Jupiter in Virgo, Neptune in Pisces — 1849 Jupiter [...]

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, [...]