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 [...]

I am giving a talk about the dwarf planet Ceres and its astrological influence on May 22 at the Aquarius Severn Astrological Society in Cheltenham. If you’re local do come. I hope I’ll have time to put some charts up from the audience so bring your details too. For details of how [...]

Our attention has been on the cacophony of the Cardinal Cross of late, but another actor in the solar system has been playing a subtle role in the drama of the skies. The asteroid Chiron — teacher, martyr, medicine man — has been sextiling Pluto for much of the past three years. [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

It’s not many people who have their own typeface, but then Carlos Santana has Sun in the third house. This is his latest album. Here’s a fun one. Carlos Santana, the shimmeringly brilliant guitarist who periodically gets rediscovered by new generations, has a fascinating natal [...]

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 [...]

Are these the 12 faces of Chiron — or just a bunch of actors in funny clothes? If you want to get a handle on a certain well known asteroid/planetoid/…er… comet… er … thingie whizzing around between Saturn and Uranus right now, then you might do well to watch a [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Mother Ayahuasca Image source unknown. If you know who this is by, tell me. “I was looking for the will of the wild. I was looking for how that will expressed itself in elemental vitality, in savage grace. Wildness is resolute for life: it cannot be otherwise; for it will die in [...]

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, [...]

Hands off our national treasure My friend down the road never “bakes a cake”, she “does a Nigella”. I’m sure she’s not alone. Is there a kitchen bookshelf in Britain that does not have a thumbed edition of How To Eat or Feast or some other of Nigella [...]

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. [...]

Ceres by Antoine Watteau. The asteroid Ceres was discovered more than two centuries ago, but it’s taken astrologers a long time to acknowledge her as a contender. Astronomers now classify her on the same level as Pluto. The sickle she holds here is also her astrological symbol. One of [...]

Yesterday Angelina Jolie told the world she’d had an operation that reduces her risk of cancer from 87% to 5%. She’d had a double mastectomy. That one of the world’s most beautiful women should choose to have both breasts removed is a powerful notion. Jolie in particular has [...]

On the evening of November 18, 1987 an inferno blasted through King’s Cross underground station, killing 31 people, and injuring and maiming three times that number. The causes were negligence and a discarded match. Two weeks ago, the BBC reunited people who were directly involved in the [...]