In Hans Christian Andersen’s story  The Snow Queen, a little boy called Kay has tiny shards of an evil, distorting mirror lodged in his heart and in his eye. “…a mirror with the power of causing all that was good and beautiful when it was reflected therein, to look poor and mean; but that [...]

There has been so much fiery energy this spring with planets spending unconscionably long in the sign of impulse and initiative, Aries. The Ram’s fiery inspiration is usually what we need to kick off the astrological year. But in the last seven years, we’ve had an awful lot of it — because [...]

This American election is an archetypal battle, the stuff of fairytale or legend. The two sides line up, accusing each other of hatred, lying and lasciviousness; of baseness, vileness, bestiality. In their vagueness sometimes, the smears require a leap of imagination from the public. What’s [...]

Los Angeles will eat you. The LA music biz specialises in packaging young girls into pop stars — Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Ariana Grande, Nicky Minaj, Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears. The singer-songwriter Kesha is one of those. Spotted by producer Dr Luke at the age of 17,  she was [...]

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 [...]

Keen readers of this blog will know I’ve been tracking the euro for years, as Uranus, Pluto and Saturn pummelled the currency from various angles. It’s been like watching a boxing match with all the razzmatazz, wordplay, and brutality, as well as cigar-wielding managers and backers [...]

For readers outside the Britain, here’s a quick summary of the British general election campaign. Voting is on May 7 (tomorrow). For most of the last couple of hundred years, voting in Britain has boiled down to a choice between two parties. Since WW2, that choice has been between Labour [...]

From egg to naiad to dragonfly. All our stories have the same beginning and the same ending. We are born and we die. A dragonfly may spend five years as a naiad and just a few months as a pond-skimming, silk-shimmering dancer. How does a naiad feel when it loses its husk and finds that, after [...]

In three days time — October 23 — we’ll experience the second of this month’s pair of eclipses. The first, the awesome and eerie lunar eclipse, on October 8, delivered some shocking revelations — Ebola, the economy, or something closer to home for many people. [...]

The defence ministers of Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Germany. Here a picture truly does say a thousand words. You don’t need me to explain why it’s momentous. The photograph  was taken on Saturday February 1 at around 3pm and on the telephone of the Dutch minister. From [...]

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. [...]

You’re nothing but a pack of cards. One of the cleverest and most enchanting heroines in all literature was born on a sultry afternoon 160 years ago on the banks of the River Isis right here in Oxford. It was the 4th of July, 1862. Charles Dodgson rowed up the river with his friend the [...]

Gustav Klimt’s Pallas Athena, 1895 Pallas Athena, the asteroid of strategy and weaving is in a cosy huddle with Uranus, the god of bright ideas. And the Moon is right there with them today, shining a soft silver glow on proceedings. The Ram is, of course, the sign of beginnings, [...]

War reporter Marie Colvin in Homs. Photo: Democratic Underground. Homs, Syria is a long way from Oxford, England. It’s on another continent, the people speak another language, have different customs than mine. They are in the midst of a bloody civil war. But the same sun rises, and then [...]

This is similar to the one I looked at but a photograph doesn’t tell you an eighth of it. I had a strangely lovely experience yesterday. I went to pick up a carpet that had been cleaned and got talking to the owners of the shop. Now I know very little about oriental carpets. I […]

Imagine you are trotting down the Appian Way in Rome sometime around 202 BC. It’s a hot spring day and you’re working up quite a sweat. Your toga is flapping behind you and your slave, a rather dashing Gaul (with rippling muscles and bedroom eyes – hang on a minute…back to [...]

Pallas Athene from the Temple of Aphaia c.500 BC One of the readers of this blog recently pointed out that pattern-recognition was a key component of astrology – and my tiny astrologer’s mind went click and then clickety click click. I got excited. Because there is an asteroid associated [...]

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 […]