It’s a risky business to draw too close to a king – you could get burned. But a planet within 1/4 of a degree of the Sun is not burned, but hugely dignified: cazimi. Two planets will be cazimi in early June; which two, what days, and what can we expect?

On Friday night I had the joy of hearing author Neil Gaiman speak at MIT. Hearing this accomplished, much-lauded writer speak so articulately about writing, imagination, and even – credibly – the connection between pornography and musicals, I sat in wonder at how one lifetime can be so relentlessly prolific, to the level of genius. [...]

Is the astrological work you do “for entertainment only”? As of Monday, New Consumer Protection Regulations go into effect in the United Kingdom on Monday which will require astrologers and others to put just such a disclaimer on their services.

On May 27, Mercury stations at 21 Gemini 32, backing up to 12 Gemini 59. This means it’s spending an exceptional amount of time in Gemini this year: from May 3 to July 10. How should we expect Mercury to behave when it’s retrograde in its own sign?

The only time I’ve ever had an astrological client ask me directly about death was 10 years ago. I was floored. Nowadays I don’t think modern astrology could even have provided my client with an answer. Here’s where I stand on it now as a traditional astrologer.

Book review: Is it possible to predict the time and cause of death from the birth chart? John Worsdale did it, time and again, with scary accuracy. If his 1825 book Celestial Philosophy weren’t so starkly Saturnian, maybe more astrologers would know how to do it.

(I did not put her in the box of astrology books. She’s the one who decided it was a nice place for her bath.) Happy birthday wishes to John Frawley today, May 16th, as the Sun transits past Caput Algol. Woohoo! If, after all my “Frawley says this” and “Frawley says that” all the time, [...]

Four of the astrology texts I ordered from Amazon arrived yesterday afternoon, and a nice bit of reading it’s going to be. Let’s see, there’s William Ramesey’s Astrologia Restaurata from 1653… Astrological Practice of Physick by Joseph Blagrave, 1671… ooh, a modern text, Celestial Philosophy or Genethliacal Astronomy from John Worsdale writing in 1825… and [...]

It seems my old philosophy schoolbooks have much to teach me about astrology. I’m currently rereading On Moral Fiction by John Gardner, which was a text for a philosophy class I took long ago, and it’s given me an “aha” moment on the subway, another way to think about our three modalities: cardinal, fixed, mutable. [...]

Deborah Houlding has a very thorough article about Gemini – the Sun sign, the principle, its relationship to Mercury - in the new issue of The Mountain Astrologer. Reading it on the subway this morning, I was excited to see she’s included the chart of a famous Gemini musician and celebrity with more than one fixed [...]