The Sun is a pilgrim on a year-long journey that begins where it ends and ends where it begins. It’s a cycle, of course, and a spiral too. And within that solar cycle — above and below it perhaps — are the cycles, longer and shorter, of the planets. Especially there is the [...]

The writer Jeanette Winterson has made some people rather cross today (apparently). She’s created a media storm in a teacup for posting this picture on her twitter account. That rabbit ate her parsley, so she killed it, skinned it and ate it. Umm Scorpio anyone? Yup: Scorpio Rising, [...]

Many years ago, in a time before mobile phones, when  skateboards were cool, trousers were high-waisted and hair sharp, a shadow came across the land. Dozens of beautiful princes were cut down in the fullness of youth by a mysterious wasting plague. The sexually transmitted disease AIDS was [...]

“…Syrians and Iraqis are both trapped between dictators on the one hand and extremists on the other. An unhappy choice.” from today’s Economist on-line. Yes, that sounds like the situation for a lot of people — more or less — caught in the crossfire of the [...]

I went for a run the other morning, starting through the University Parks — orderly paths thick with joggers and dog-walkers, an arboretum of specimen trees, a lily-pad spattered pond, smooth green playing fields — and crossed over the River Cherwell to run through the [...]

May Magnificat May is Mary’s month, and I Muse at that and wonder why: Her feasts follow reason, Dated due to season— Candlemas, Lady Day; But the Lady Month, May, Why fasten that upon her, With a feasting in her honour? Is it only its being brighter Than the most are must delight her? [...]

At least 50 people have died in the catastrophic flooding that began last week in the Balkans, including entire families swept away by the rising water. Around a million people have been displaced and millions more are without clean water. Last May it was Central Europe that was under [...]

We all know it’s been a right old spring so far, or should that be a rite of spring (a ballet which ends with a ritual sacrifice)? With Jupiter in Cancer, emotions have been huge, billowing things, like overfilled water balloons leaking all over the place. Then there were the eclipses in [...]

On the night of the full moon of April 14/15, armed men broke into a school in the Nigerian town of Chibok and abducted almost 300 schoolgirls. The girls were forced into lorries at gunpoint and driven deep into the forests of northern Nigeria. They have been swallowed by darkness. We [...]

“There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures.” — […]

Before time began, gods emerged from chaos. Uranus, the god of the sky, made love to the earth, Gaia, every night, and from their union were born giants and Titans, both hated by their father, who, consequently, imprisoned his children in the deepest depths of the earth. One, Saturn, escaped. [...]

The rest of the world divorces, separates, splits up, breaks up, calls the lawyers, tears each others eyes out; film-star Gwyneth Paltrow and Coldplay frontman Chris Martin “consciously uncouple“. We may all roll our eyes at the (conscious or not) superiority of their announcement, [...]

Port Meadow, Oxford, yesterday, February 16 I started to write this post in the middle of the Full Moon storm, so it’s slightly out of synch with the weather now – three days later. But I have left the words as they are because I think it works with the current slightly confused [...]

Chart data is from astrodatabank. I can’t tell if Woody Allen is a child molester from looking at his astrological chart. No one can. But I can tell you that transiting Pluto-Venus is smack-dab on his North Node in Capricorn in the fifth house of children. The North Node is your point of [...]

Vasilisa in the Wood, Ivan Bilibin (1899). Vasilisa the Beautiful escaped from the child-eating witch of the deep, dark forest Baba Yaga, using one of the witch’s own torches, hand-crafted, as they might say on etsy, from a human skull. Baba Yaga, a drooling hag who terrorises the [...]

Port Meadow, Oxford this morning. The water level is still rising. First rain and snow, then floods. The old gods. Thousands of years ago, we’d have thrown iron into the water to propitiate them, or maybe sacrificed a white bull. Today we gaze at screens. There’s awe but surely [...]

Eurasian shaman, early 20th century from a Russian ethnographic collection. “Sometimes a wild god comes to the table. He is awkward and does not know the ways Of porcelain, of fork and mustard and silver. His voice makes vinegar from wine. “When the wild god arrives at the door, [...]

Winter Afternoon — Yuli Yulievich Klever — It’s just after four in the afternoon and night already. Daylight went in a blinking here in the deep of the year. Tomorrow the Sun moves into Capricorn, Saturn’s sign; the sign of responsibility, of the father, of old age [...]

Gravity opens with the longest, loveliest view of our pearlescent planet, so large and luminous — and behind it black space. The Earth is our home, our heart, our mother — but what happens when we cut the cord that ties us to her? (Spoiler alert. Pretty much all is revealed.) Dr [...]