Tag: Chart Interpretation
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Gifts for Mankind. Troy and Mycenae – from Heinrich Schliemannn
There is no exact birth time for Heinrich Schliemann, the man considered the father of Archaeology after his groundbreaking excavations at Troy, Mycenae and Tiryns. I have set his birth time at midnight, based on several events that coincided with the progression of his Age Point: the death of his mother; the end of his…
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Anaἲs Nin. A veiled Eros.
Known as a diarist, novelist and writer of erotica, Anaἲs Nin was a woman of many faces. In her diaries of 35 000 pages, kept over 55 years, we see a daughter hurt by her father, a woman married to a banker, a bigamist later in life when she had two husbands, a femme fatale, a…
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Aldous Huxley. The Birdman from Beyond.
Aldous Huxley is best known for his novel Brave New World, a dark vision of the future, which is regarded as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. He’s also known for his experiments with mescaline and the resulting essays, The Doors of Perception. The chart resembles a bird, an Indian myna perhaps,…
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Bruce Chatwin’s Songline
A songline is a track that Australian Aborigines walk, singing their territories and their lives into creation, much like the Essenes danced their world into creation. As a travel writer, Bruce Chatwin walked his life into being. He travelled to territories little known in the 1970s such as Afghanistan, Patagonia at the southernmost tip of…
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Frida Kahlo. Torn in Two.
The first thing that catches the eye in Mexican painter Frida Kahlo’s chart is the red band running through her core, much like the steel handrail that pierced her body in a bus accident at age 18. This injury would cause complications throughout her life. With Saturn – her physical ego – as her strongest…
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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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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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Thomas de Quincey. The Chart of an English Opium Eater.
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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Oscar Wilde. A Smooth Diamond Turned Rough.
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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T S Eliot. The Love Life of a Saint.
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…
The Astrological Psychology of Bruno & Louise Huber 