David Lorimer’s (and others’) reviews in Paradigm Explorer (new name for the magazine of the Scientific and Medical Network) are always worth reading. You get an impression of far more current books than you could ever read. I was particularly struck by David’s review of The Oxford Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality, edited by Lisa…
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Sylvia Plath won the Pulitzer prize for her collection of confessional poems posthumously, after she committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. Throughout her life she was clinically depressed, always aware of death. Understanding her psyche is an undertaking for a psychiatrist, which I am not. But perhaps Astrological Psychology could throw some…
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Wikipedia well describes the pedigree of Roberto Assagioli and his psychosynthesis. Psychosynthesis arose from the psychoanalytic tradition initiated by Freud, but was more akin to Jung’s revisionist approach, and indeed moved beyond it. “Psychosynthesis became the first approach born of psychoanalysis that also included the artistic, altruistic and heroic potentials of the human being.” Assagioli’s…
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I recently visited the Holst Birthplace Museum in Cheltenham and was fascinated to learn about this British composer’s life. I’ve long been a fan of his Planets Suite and have occasionally wondered how he was inspired to write music about seven planets with their correct, traditional astrological characteristics. At the museum I discovered that he…
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The Nobel Prize winning Thomas Mann, who wrote many novellas, novels and essays, is considered the most influential and representative German author of his time. Although he supported the Weimar Republic as a young man, he later wrote against Nazism and Hitler. Consequently, Mann spent the rest of his life in Switzerland and the USA.…
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A Review of Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson, by Gary Lachman (New York: TarcherPerigee, 2016), with reflections on Wilson’s astrological chart and Sun in Cancer’s search for meaning and purpose Whether or not you are a fan of Colin Wilson (1931-2013), Gary Lachman’s biography of his life and thought is…
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Questioning why life can be so difficult and why we experience so many problems, crises and traumas is something we all face, especially at difficult times in our lives. Trying to understand this has troubled humanity since time began. Fear of the unknown, of upsetting gods or goddesses and the concept of divine punishment has…
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Best-known for his novel Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Thomas de Quincey was one of the most prolific English writers of his time. Almost two centuries ago, he also started the tradition of addiction literature in the West, resulting in the drug-induced writing of the seventies. Neptune or Jupiter? There is no birth…
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Sigmund Freud as the father of the theory of the unconscious wrote the first description of dreaming and dreamwork in his series of lectures to the University of Vienna from 1915-1917, A General Introduction to Psycho-analysis. In it he explained that dreams are the “means of removing, by hallucinatory satisfaction, mental stimuli that disturb sleep”…
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The chart looks like a rough-cut diamond with many facets – an apt symbol for Oscar Wilde the brilliant dandy who entertained society with his plays, shocked the Victorian world with his homosexuality, invented today’s celebrity cult and left posterity many witty epigrams such as “We are all in the gutter, but some of…
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The Nodal Axis is a very important part of your Birth Chart because it gives insights into your past and future. Although the North Node points to new growth, challenges and possibilities, the South Node can hold a lot of your natural talents and abilities. The South Node shows by the house placement the area of life…
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The first thing that strikes one when looking at the chart is the red band of oppositions keeping the blue aspects, the Venus side of T S Eliot, well removed from the lower hemisphere, particularly the 3rd quadrant of Instinct in which there is not a single planet, only oppositions to his age point from…
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The Papers of the 2013 Sophia Centre Conference on Celestial Magic, at which I gave a talk on “The Transformational Techniques of Huber Astrology” have finally been published in a double issue of Culture and Cosmos, which is available from Amazon at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Culture-Cosmos-Vol-19-Celestial/dp/1907767738 In his introduction, Nicholas Campion likens magical thinking to “awareness of the…
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Wanda Smit explains the significance of astrological psychology for her own path of personal growth and development, in this extract from the introduction to her ebook One Cosmic Day. “We are all deprived; we are all disappointed; and therefore we are all, in some sense, idealists. The need to link the real and the ideal…
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Packed with so many good things to savour, I enjoyed and relished this newly-published book Meetings with Amazing People by Will Parfitt. Will has a long association with APA and his 2003 book, Psychosynthesis: The Elements and Beyond, is recommended reading for those studying our published Diploma Course in Astrological Psychology. Will has packed his…
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