“…[The ANC struggle] is a struggle of the African people, inspired by their own suffering and their own experience. It is a struggle for the right to live. During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, [...]

Hygeia by Gustav Klimt Imagine that you are a citizen of Ephesus. The time is just over a two thousand years ago. You’re rather well off and everything in your life is just super — except that you get these terrible headaches every now and then. So you decide to try a cure across [...]

Walter Crane imagined the beast as a boar. Once upon a time, in a country rather like this one, not very long ago, lived a young woman called Belle… Anne Anderson imagined a sort of beaky beast The first written version of Beauty and the Beast comes from mid-18th century France, but such [...]

Well, Mercury has begun his long walk out of the Underworld. Today he is at 2° Scorpio — only another 28° to go. It’s was a powerful retrograde, as you might expect when the planet of mind goes through the sign of depth psychology. Of course, Mercury is still in Scorpio until the [...]

Singing the cheerful refrain, “Holy shit, shit, God’s shit”, while parodying prayer in the sanctum of one of Russia’s most revered cathedrals, the feminist punk band Pussy Riot, managed to get right up the noses of the Russian establishment on February 21, 2012. The [...]

The four gospels surround the lamb of god. When a medieval craftsman lovingly carved a representation of the four gospels for the cover of this book, he was using symbols that had been sacred for thousands of years before the birth of Christ. The four gospels – Luke, Mark, John, and Mathew – [...]

In Blue. Wassily Kandinsky: Saturn in Scorpio, Venus in Sagittarius The weather changed yesterday and a dry, icy wind sent tiny clouds fleeting across the sky, trees rattling and swaying, branches to the floor, drifts of leaves whirling up like spirits. Autumn had arrived overnight. Today, [...]

Peter Higgs, Emeritus Professor of Physics at Edinburgh, was – finally – awarded the Nobel Prize yesterday. It was entirely expected, since his hypothesis – that there’s a subatomic particle called a boson – was finally proved correct in a (rather large) [...]

Prometheus by Andre Durand. Srelton: Uranian Is there a gay planet? Not really, but perhaps for obvious reasons, the planet of revolution, eccentricity and difference, Uranus, often makes itself powerfully felt in the natal charts of gay people. Some famous singing examples are Elton John with [...]

The Neighborhood Bully – John George Brown Politics just go nasty again in the UK. Let me explain. In this country, there’s a “Leader of the Opposition” in parliament who is the head of the main party that’s out of office, and whose job it is to question the [...]

The Return of Persephone by Frederick Leighton. Wikimedia Commons. Golden-bright Persephone, Demeter’s beautiful daughter, was picking flowers one day in the wide, scented valley of Enna in Sicily when Hades, the prince of hell, burst out of the ground and grabbed her and pulled her down [...]

Mother Rose and her baby. Mary Cassatt (Ceres conjunct MC in Scorpio) who became famous for her intensely emotional pictures of the mother-child bond Wikimedia Commons. To caress the soft downy scalp of a baby, her head small enough to cradle in the palm of your hand, her hands like [...]

The Death of Arthur by John Carrick (1852). Mallory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (the main source for all King Arthur legends) was published a few weeks after Richard III’s death “And thus I clothe my naked villainy With odd, old ends stol’n out of holy writ, And seem a saint, [...]

Prometheus, Nicolas-Sebastien Adam. Prometheus, the rebel god, stole fire from heaven and brought it to the human race. This made Zeus, king of the gods, cross, because fire was one of the gods’ secrets, along with lightning and thunder and stuff. According to some versions of the story, [...]

No. Really. Astrology is not science. I know this won’t come as a surprise to you, because, well, obviously it’s not science. Astrologers use some scientific data, like the position of the planets at a particular time, and often some good statistics, but you could never do a double [...]

A very unusual pattern is forming in the sky this morning. It’s called a Star of David, because it’s made up of two almost perfectly intersecting Grand Trines. You can see it in the image here. This is an Earth-Water Star, which should already give you an idea of the combination of practical [...]

Venus at her Mirror, Velazquez. Today and this week, the planet of beauty, art and peace, Venus, looks into a mirror that magnifies her image: that is Neptune her big blue brother swirling through the outer solar system. Venus is activating the water grand trine that connects Saturn (making [...]

This terrific self-portrait dates from 1927. Just as a supplement to the Satie piece: here is Suzanne Valadon’s chart. She was a wonderful woman, a free spirit, single mother, great painter and an inspiration for many other artists (Neptune in the 7th), in particular Renoir. For a while [...]

D likes to mooch around the local junk market on Thursdays. Today he came home with an old record player. We are spinning discs that have been in storage for – ahem – decades this afternoon. Perfect on a sunny evening with Mercury retrograding through the sign of nostalgia, [...]

Millais’ Ophelia – suspended in a dream. It’s emotional, it’s dreamy, it’s images and colours, not words. It’s a misty vision on the edge of your mind, and the time between sleeping and waking. It’s a pool of water reflecting the sky with a fish [...]