Agia Sofia: layers of meaning Photo: Osvaldo Gago, wikimedia commons If you stand still in the middle of the vast space of the Agia Sofia, Istanbul’s great mosque/church, as the masses of tourists swirl around you and the silvery light filters from high up windows, you can almost feel [...]

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. [...]

May 25th sees the final eclipse in the Gemini-Sagittarius group that’s spanned November 2o1o until now. You can see it’s at 4° Sagittarius. In the way of these eclipse groups, it has overlapped at one end with Cancer-Capricorn and now it’s overlapping at this end with [...]

The eagle is another symbol for Scorpio. My friend Michael Wolfstar, who runs the website Neptune Cafe, wrote to me after reading my previous post American Aprils. He didn’t disagree with the substance of it, but he wanted to point out that the chart he uses for the US has Scorpio Rising [...]

The “Minutemen”, American revolutionaries ready to snatch up their weapons at a moment’s notice, confront the redcoats. Their flexibility, speed and the urgency of their cause was a big factor in their victory. Allied to the fact that they were on home territory. Even though [...]

Winning her second term 1983. The whole country was frozen, dry and still in March and early April. In my garden, which at this time of year is usually bursting with buoyant blooms, nothing changed for weeks. This was all due to the strange, bitter weather, of course. Spring had been arrested. [...]

Thanks to Astrodatablog for finding the birth time of the new pope, and yes, he has got Ceres on an angle. Birth time is given as 9pm, so I expect it is approximate. Click here to see how Ceres is important for popes.  

So now it’s naughty little Cyprus, the island of Aphrodite, which is giving the eurozone the screaming abdabs. Aphrodite is the Greek Venus, of course. In astrology, Venus rules money, so maybe it’s not such a surprise that Cyprus was, until a week ago, a great place to get your [...]

Pope Francis. More than half of the denizens of this planet have just had a new leader chosen for them. Two small groups of powerful people within two vast, and rather arcane institutions have voted in two new leaders on opposite sides of the world. President Xi Jinping We have a new Pope, [...]

Here is what I wrote about Syria last spring. “Let us pray for as many ceasefires as possible, because this is a long, drawn-out struggle. I really hate to be pessimistic, but it seems to me there is a strong potential for civil war, whether Assad himself stays or goes. If the [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

There’s a lovely little google doodle today of the planets moving around the our star, the Sun. It’s there in celebration of Nikolaus Copernicus’ 500th birthday. Copernicus’ book, On The Revolution of the Celestial Spheres, in which he posited that the Earth and planets [...]

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 [...]

(This is the second part of my piece on the UK. There is much more to say, but for now, this will suffice.) Sometimes it feels like Britain is a boxer still upright after 10 rounds but punch drunk: standing up because of a combination of will power and show business. One blow after another [...]

Corridors of power under a Neptune transit. For a month or so last summer what it meant to be British in the 21st century seemed so clear – in an eccentric sort of way. There were James Bond and the Queen and Mr Bean cavorting about, and various sporty types and dancing nurses and Voldemort, [...]

The Moon from De Sphaera As I write, the Moon is running the gamut of an opposition to Pluto. She’s in her own sign, Cancer, so she’s no pushover, even for the lord of the Underworld. But as she slides through the sea of Cancer, she brings into action all kinds of interesting [...]

Harry: Mars in Sagittarius Oh dear, the royal family is so much better when they are like proper icons – that is silent. Prince Harry, the third in line to the throne, has given a disastrous interview about his life in the army. This is from the normally flag-waving Daily Telegraph: “Take a [...]

Indians have taken to the streets to protest against violence against women. India, the world’s biggest democracy, is a great big bhel puri of languages, religions, customs and manners.  Special interests are as diverse as religious customs, but for the past month Indians have been [...]

After I gave birth to my first daughter in a London hospital, I shared a room with three other women – a Palestinian, an Israeli, and a London Iranian. No kidding. There was some awkward negotiating around drips, cots, nurses and nappies. But the presence of tiny new babies creates a certain [...]