As Nicholas Campion wrote in his review of Kim Farnell’s Modern Astrologers for the Astrology Quarterly 84/3 (Autumn 2019): “Alan Leo was a monumental figure in the history of modern Western astrology, his influence still felt in all forms of esoteric and karmic astrology… his emphasis on self-knowledge and the soul is an ancestor of…
Following on from Ghislaine’s recent post, reflecting on her tutoring experience, here are shorter contributions by other recent tutors. I felt it to be a great privilege to be invited to become a tutor back in 2010. And it has also been a privilege to work with all the different kinds of students that came…
The Astrocalc software programme has been around for a long time. Although it produced Huber charts they were not deemed to be of a quality suitable for studying the APA Diploma, so Astrocalc did not appear in our list of recommended software. The latest version Astrocalc 6.5 has been made available as a free download,…
I have been agonizing over what to include in an article on William Blake since the huge and mind-boggling exhibition of his work opened at Tate Britain, Millbank, on 11 September 2019 and it has only has six more weeks to run until 2 February 2020. Born on 28 November 1757 at 19:45 in London,…
A major exhibition of multi-media sculptures by Takis—nickname of Panayiotis Vassilakis—began at Tate Modern on 3 July and continues until 27 October 2019. Self-educated Takis, who left war-torn Greece to join artists and intellectuals in Paris in 1954, was a bold and original voice of the 1960s. He frequently visited London, had a studio in…
Having recently been introduced to the work of Sufi master, Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi (1165-1240), I read an interpretation of his treatise, The Orbits of the Stars—written in eleven days, in 1298, two years before he left Andalusia, where he was born, headed East to Mecca and, after travelling widely, eventually settled in Damascus. Mystical Astrology…
Vincent Willem Van Gogh was born on 30 March 1853, seven years after the discovery of Neptune, and the anniversary of his birthday was celebrated this year by the opening of a new exhibition at Tate Britain and the launch in Britain of a new film about his life starring Willem Dafoe. Van Gogh was…
We all know that colour is an essential feature of astrological psychology, and it gives immediate meaning to the Huber-style birth chart. In the early days of the English Huber School, charts were hand-drawn with coloured pens. Then along came computers to help the process, and many charts were of necessity black-and-white. Of course, this…
In this short extract from her book Astrological Psychology, Esotericism and the Transpersonal, Sue Lewis highlights the influences that led to the Hubers’ pioneering the use of colour in the interpretation of the astrological chart. It begins with the period the Hubers spent in Florence, working with Roberto Assagioli at his Psychosynthesis Institute, helping with…
Sue Lewis answers Joyce Hopewell’s questionnaire, which aims to elicit what motivates people to write books about astrological psychology. Sue is author of the book Astrological Psychology, Western Esotericism and the Transpersonal. 1) What inspired you to write this book? While researching for an MA in Western Esotericism, the many parallels I found between the…
A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic, by Peter Wadhams, 1st pub. 2016, Penguin 2017 This 200-page informative and illustrated paperback, explaining why Arctic sea ice is retreating much more rapidly than most climate models have projected, and why this has serious implications for climate change and the survival of our planet, came…
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…
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…
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…
On 3 June 2016, the greatest sportsman of the twentieth century died at the age of 74. Mohammad Ali, born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr on 17 January 1942, at 18:35 in Louisville, Kentucky, was an American light-heavyweight gold medallist, the only man to win the world heavyweight championship three times. He brought boxing from the…