If he were still alive, Paul Auster today would be celebrating his 79th birthday. He was one of my favourite writers when I was a teenager, and I decided to take a look at his chart. I. The Venusian Women of His Life I right away spotted Venus in Sagittarius, in the 2nd house. This…
Over the last few days I have been reading and watching things about the Portuguese Commandos. It is an elite troop, known as the Red Berets, with a very specific reputation, built around a training course that is violently harsh on the body and mind, almost a process of deliberate mortification, in which people are…
Yesterday I analysed a map where Mars was clearly an accidental benefic, working in favor of the native. Today I’m checking a chart where the exact opposite happens, with Mars doing what he does best: destroying. I. Scorpio Rising The native is born with Scorpio rising, a feminine and fixed sign, of centripetal nature, which…
Bill Hicks was one of the most intensely influential figures of my adolescence. An anarchist with a profoundly spiritual, untamed and subversive core, he embodied exactly what a teenager at the height of his estrangement from the world often admires most. His comedy was a philosophical manifesto disguised as stand-up, a form of spiritual warfare…
When working astrologically with derived houses, we gain the ability to understand to what extent another person’s destiny infiltrates our own. This was precisely the case of a querent who came to me recently, concerned about a recurring pattern she observed within her circle of friends: men and women who, almost chronically, face turbulence in…
The entrance of Venus into Scorpio today reactivates one of the great paradoxes of the zodiac: the principle of union subjected to the principle of division. The goddess of charm and attraction swims in the poison, blood, and instinct, where love ceases to be harmony and becomes possession, control, the urge to devour the Other…
David Foster Wallace’s chart is the portrait of a mind forged in crystal and iron. Thought was destiny. His Mercury, ruler of both the Moon and the Ascendant, was itself ruled and joined by a fierce Saturn domiciled in Aquarius in the ninth house – domus Dei -, binding soul and flesh to the discipline…
Astrology reveals paradoxes hidden within the order of the heavens. When Capricorn, the natural sign of the tenth house, is placed at the fourth, the axis turns inside out. What is usually the summit of visibility becomes the deepest of roots. The mountain sign descends into the cavern. Saturn, ruler of Capricorn, if placed here,…
Astrology has long been accused of being a prison of necessity, a web of iron fates traced by the stars upon one’s fragile body. But those who look beyond fortune-telling and prediction find that traitional astrology is more than a fatalistic code. It is a mirror of the labyrinth itself, a language of the cosmic…
