Sylvia Plath. Mercury’s Child.

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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Roberto Assagioli

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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Gustav Holst and The Planets Suite

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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Opposites Maketh Mann.

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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Beyond the Robot

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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Celestial Magic

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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