Shivashakti – male and female energies combine in one body. The asteroids – Ceres, Juno, Vesta and Pallas, named for four of the great goddesses of Olympus – were actually discovered before the outer planets Neptune and Pluto. But you wouldn’t think so, given the amount of [...]

Is this the most influential portrait of a woman from the 20th century? You wouldn’t believe it now, but way back in 1991, this cover of Vanity Fair showing the then highest-earning actress in Hollywood naked and heavily pregnant caused a storm of controversy. Why? Because some people [...]

Tiger Mom: me me me As an indulgent, child-worshipping Western mother, the Tiger Mom thing really gets up my nose. In case you missed it, (which I’m sure you didn’t), last year a law professor at Yale published a book explaining how she was a brilliant mother as well as a [...]

You may have read some of my previous posts on the “tutelary deities” used by Roman astrologers. These came as a surprise to me when I read about them last year since I’d not come across them in any astrology texts or lectures that I’d attended previously. Suffice to [...]

Shopping for bread in the middle of a riot can be hectic. Tunisia. Have you looked closely at your grocery bill recently? It’s gone through the roof in the last 12 months right. I’m sure inflation for food is way ahead of the official figure. So I was intrigued to read this piece [...]

“That old black ram is tupping your white ewe.” Othello strangles Desdemona  from Othello Othello rose to the highest public office; he fell because of a fatal flaw, a personality defect so big that it opened its mouth and swallowed him. Right now we are witnessing a tragedy. [...]

Shade and Darkness – The Evening before the Deluge. JMW Turner 1843 A wall of water ripped through inland Australia tearing up trees, tossing cars and buses like flotsam, swamping houses and taking lives. Today hundreds of Brazilians died in muddy landslides caused by torrents of rain. In [...]

As you know, there are seven heavenly bodies in traditional astrology. The boys – Sun, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The girls – Moon, Venus. Five against two. Now does that seem fair to you? Does that even seem like life? Ceres, goddess of fertility, is sometimes assigned to [...]

After making the sun and the moon and the sky and the mountains and the sea, and after making the animals and the birds and the trees, the creator decided to make something really special. So he fashioned men and women out of clay. But he did not want them all to be the same, […]

I find reading old astrology books a very good way to get to sleep. Dane Rudhyar is marvellously soporific. I hope some of it will filter into my dreams, and be reborn as a brilliant insight. Last night I turned to CEO Carter, who is an old stand-by in the wee small hours. And in […]

Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, Brazil. Is the mother goddess giving a helping hand? In Brazil, Dilma Rousseff; in Australia Julia Gillard, who’s next? Are sisters finally doing it for themselves? Here’s what I think happened in the heavens that might give us a clue. On the [...]

I’ve been looking at pictures of the Biblical floods in Pakistan, listening to the statistics – more people affected by this than by the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004. Is this possible? So I found a map and realised that the area being flooded is the Indus Valley itself, one of the [...]

My mother phoned up this morning to tell me that she had her very own gusher staying with her – in the form of a dear friend who talks a lot. He’s lovely but he chatters so much that she feels as if she’s drowning in a sea of words. I happen to know he’s […]