Today, the Bizantine Church celebrates Saint Maximus the Confessor, the theologian who united in his own body the Word and the Cross. Amid the Monothelite controversy, Maximus defended to the point of martyrdom that in Christ there coexist two wills (the Divine and the human) reconciled in Love. Far from being only theoretical, the doctrine…
David Lynch would have turned eighty yesterday, and this text offers an introductory delineation of his natal chart. I. Scorpio Rising The Ascendant, at 18 degrees of Scorpio and only three degrees beyond the Via Combusta, situates him in an incarnation marked by profound emotional necessity. Scorpio, a Water sign of feminine nature, seeks to…
This text presents a delineation of the foundations of James Hetfield’s natal chart, constructed using the Whole Sign Houses system, laying out the internal architecture of the chart itself. Its main axes, its dignities and debilities, and the structural tensions that organise the native’s life and work. I. Capricorn Rising and the Rule of the…
The querent’s question was simple: he wished to know whether he should, or even could, re-establish contact with a friend with whom he had abruptly severed relations several months earlier. At the moment the chart was cast, Pisces rose on the Ascendant, making Jupiter the significator of the querent. Pisces, a Water sign and feminine…
The querent’s question was clear and delicate: should he spend a few days in a Cistercian monastery, in what would be his first contact with monastic-Benedictine life? The moment I opened the chart revealed a telling detail. The Ascendant at 4 degrees of Virgo, a sign of analysis, modesty, and discretion, but too early for…
The beginning of each year is always marked by a flood of pleas for peace. Leaders and institutions come forward with the same refrain: concord, understanding, ceasefire. But, beneath the sublunar sphere, human wishes are always shaped by the higher forces that press upon incarnation. After all, what moves above manifests below, as planets are…
Lately I have been devoting attention to horary astrology. One of the first questions I received came from a lawyer who wished to know whether one of her clients would return to her. The Ascendant was at 8 degrees of Gemini, a position which, although still early, does not invalidate the judgement. Very early degrees…
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…
In the opening of Lost, the first track on Neurosis’ Enemy of the Sun (1993), the grave voice of Paul Bowles asks: “Are you lost?”. The sample, taken from Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky, drifts through the track like an old voice amiss in an electric desert. To be lost is the necessary vertigo before…
It is Christmas. Right now, in small Bulgarian, Armenian, or Georgian churches, lost in remote villages, the vigil happens. There is no comfort. No electric lighting. No staged décor. There is cold, stone, aching feet, repetition, hours standing upright. The incense weighs on the air. The Pantocrator dominates the dome: an asymmetric face, one side…
