Astrological Psychology

Tag: Wanda Smit

  • Frida Kahlo. Torn in Two.

    Frida Kahlo. Torn in Two.

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    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…

  • Sylvia Plath. Mercury’s Child.

    Sylvia Plath. Mercury’s Child.

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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…

  • Opposites Maketh Mann.

    Opposites Maketh Mann.

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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.…

  • Thomas de Quincey. The Chart of an English Opium Eater.

    Thomas de Quincey. The Chart of an English Opium Eater.

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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…

  • Oscar Wilde. A Smooth Diamond Turned Rough.

    Oscar Wilde. A Smooth Diamond Turned Rough.

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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…

  • T S Eliot. The Love Life of a Saint.

    T S Eliot. The Love Life of a Saint.

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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…

  • To Realise One’s Nature

    To Realise One’s Nature

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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…

  • Colette. The Venus of the Belle Époque.

    Colette. The Venus of the Belle Époque.

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    Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, known as Colette because she insisted, in her teens already, on being called by her last name – a European practice normally extended only to boys – is best known as the creator of Gigi, a novel that was turned into a very successful film. Before Gigi, she wrote a series of voluptuous novels…

  • George Michael. A Cowboy and an Angel

    George Michael. A Cowboy and an Angel

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    Although George Michael was seen as a poised, clever sex symbol, he had strong principles. He firmly believed in giving what he got. In April 2014, he told fans he’d been watching his 2011 tour video: “I saw the luckiest man on earth. So much love given to one man,” he wrote. “…I love you.”…

  • Marcel Proust. Remembrance of Things Planetary

    Marcel Proust. Remembrance of Things Planetary

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    The upside down Kite figure in the chart looks more like a sailing ship with the Saturn/North Node opposition forming its mast. The Small Talent Triangle is the ship and the Large Talent Triangle the sails. But the inner resources from all the blue aspects didn’t make writing plain sailing for Marcel Proust, one of…

  • Leonard Cohen

    Leonard Cohen

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    Leonard Cohen: Canadian Poet and Priest For six decades, Leonard Cohen revealed his soul to the world through poetry and song – his deep and timeless humanity touching our very core… Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Cohen’s chart resembles the side-view of an opened case of opera glasses for close-up viewing of shows. The…

  • The Tyranny of Aesthetics

    The Tyranny of Aesthetics

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    I never knew, in my twenties, why I felt compelled to move from one flat to another, seldom staying anywhere longer than six months. Six months of fixity seemed to be all I could handle. I’d paint the walls, lengthen or shorten the curtains I had used in the previous flat, adding a frill or…