not categorised

Spoon bender, watch-healer and charismatic showman Uri Geller, now living in his homeland Israel, has turned 75. He became famous demonstrating on television what he claimed to be psychokinesis, dowsing, and telepathy – describing hidden drawings and making watches stop or run faster, which he said he could do it through the strength of his mind. He became a  bete noir for paranormal debunker James Randi who claimed to have revealed Geller’s feats as stage magic tricks, but was himself a fraud.

  Controversy has dogged Geller throughout his career, at points sending him into eating disorders and withdrawal, but he claims to have acclamation from the CIA for his ‘remote viewing’ skills and to have been employed by mining companies to dowse sites for mineral deposits.

  My own sense is that Geller does have psychic skills but these by their nature are fragile and erratic abilities not well-suited to stage or TV performances, so there has to be an element of trickery to maintain audience appeal.

  Similar claims of deception have been made against healer Matthew Manning, who also claimed to have the ability to bend metal and affect electrical equipment.  What is intriguing is one striking similarity in their charts.

 Geller, 20 December 1946 2.30am Tel Aviv, is a Sagittarius with a Scorpio Moon. More significantly he has Saturn Pluto in Leo conjunct his Midheaven – in traditional astrology Saturn Pluto was the sign of the black magician, so deemed to have paranormal powers. He also has Uranus in the 8^th house which is the chart area of transformation, connected with alchemy, magic and occult practices as well as money and sexuality.   His 1^st house Jupiter Moon Venus in Scorpio square his Pluto will make him ultra-charming and persuasive.

  Matthew Manning, 17 August 1955 4pm Redruth, England, has a heavily weighted Pluto conjunct his Sun, Mars, Moon and Venus; and Uranus, like Geller, is in his 8^th. Uranus, lord of the lightning flash, being the planet not only of insight, sudden change but is also associated with electricity, the internet.

  Most individuals with psychic abilities, able to tap into deeper layers of reality have planets in the 8^th. Since the regions they are able to contact lie beyond rational thought, they arouse great fear in the uber-logical –  who cannot cope with the notion they are not in control and that life is a good deal more mysterious than their boxed-in scientific brains allow for, hence the violent attacks. Which isn’t to say a good many psychics aren’t frauds, or semi-frauds and that you can launch space rockets by the power of the mind. But life on the edge has yet to give up many of its secrets.  

Helena Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, also had Uranus in the 8^th and was similarly controversial during her lifetime, ‘championed by supporters as an enlightened Sage and derided as a charlatan by critics.’ Theosophy is a religious movement and part of the occultist stream of Western esotericism, drawing on Neoplatonism as well as Hinduism and Buddhism and has had a wide influence on other esoteric movements and the New Age.

  In addition to an 8^th house Uranus she had an influential/controlling 10^th house Pluto trine her Leo Sun. She was born 12 August 1831 2.17am Ukraine.

India is forecast to become sixth largest global economy leaving France and the UK behind, with GDP expected to grow by 9.5 per cent, more than any other large economy.

  What is marginally odd astrologically-speaking is that the Reserve Bank of India chart, 1 April 1935, indicates a fairly calamitous series of events coming up within six months as the Solar Arc Pluto is conjunct the Mars. While all influences can have a positive as well as a negative side, that one isn’t normally good news – trapped, scary, a dead-halt.

  Nor is PM Narendra Modi’s Term chart, 30 May 2019 7.04pm Delhi, looking too upbeat. The tough-minded and discouraging Saturn Pluto conjunction is moving by Solar Arc to close to exact within six months (like Boris Johnson’s) and tr Neptune is in a dented-hopes square to the Jupiter and Solar Arc Jupiter all through 2022.

   Modi has already lost his unyielding, strongman image, having had to repeal his controversial farm laws in the face of mass protests and unrest.  Analysts say the climbdown reflected anxiety about upcoming state elections which will be seen a midterm referendum on his government that will set the tone for 2024 general election.

  His previous draconian approach to dissent whether over the  catastrophic 2016 demonetisation policy, the crackdown in Kashmir, the anti-Muslim citizenship law or missteps during the devastating April second wave of Covid, elicited no apologies. Activists and critics are regularly jailed under terrorism laws, civil society groups have been hounded and shut down and protests are repeatedly met with force. So this reversal and public contrition is seen as a victory for democracy.

  The India chart, 15 August 1947 12 am Delhi, will have a shaky start to 2022 with tr Saturn square the India Saturn Pluto and India Midheaven through January which will be downbeat; and tr Saturn moves on to square the financial Venus into February and after that squares the Sun on and off till December which will be sobering and a reality check.

 That is followed by tr Pluto square the Solar Arc Midheaven from February, on and off till late 2023 Uranus, which will create substantial challenges and major questions about future direction. Tr Uranus square the Pluto Saturn will bring unrest and disruptions in April and then brings financial upsets as it squares the India Venus in May, moving on to square the Sun in 2023/24. None of which suggests seamless progress along the same track. Although the India Jupiter may prove a saving grace or at least a buffer against some of the above, bringing lucky breaks and expansion in 2023. Tr Uranus will be square the India Sun in 2023 up to April 2024 which suggests the next election will spring a few surprises.

 Narendra Modi’s personal chart, 17 September 1950, has a serious and determined Sun, Saturn Mercury in Virgo being undermined by tr Neptune in opposition throughout 2022 so it won’t be his favourite year.  Tr Uranus will hard aspect his ruthless Pluto in Leo square Mars in Scorpio from July 2022 right through the next election, so he may react badly to external pressures. And ditto this year with tr Saturn square his Pluto and opposition his Mars from March onwards all year which will hem in his more dictatorial impulses.

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The James Webb Space Telescope had a perfect launch on its  ‘voyage back to the birth of the universe’. It is planned to succeed the Hubble Space Telescope as NASA’s flagship mission in astrophysics and designed to answer unsolved questions about the universe. It will look further back in time than ever before to 400 million years after the Big Bang and will enable investigations in astronomy and cosmology, observing distant events and objects, such as the formation of the first galaxies, and providing detailed atmospheric characterization of potentially habitable exoplanets.

 Development began in 1996 for a 2007 launch with a US$500 million budget but delays, cost over runs and several possible cancellations along the way, ended up with a $10bn (£7.5bn) budget and the launch on 25 December 2021 from Kourou spaceport in French Guiana at 12.20pm UTC.

  The chart isn’t quite as well tied together as the Hubble Telescope launched on 24 April 1990 12.33pm Merritt Island, Florida, which has two talented Half Grand Sextiles.

  But both charts oddly have their respective Suns at a 4 degree Earth sign – Hubble in Taurus and Webb in Capricorn. Hubble has the North Node at 12 degrees Aquarius and Webb has Saturn at 11 Aquarius. Both have the researching, communicative Mercury at roughly the same degree Earth sign.

  Not sure what all this adds up to and I confess I have not the remotest idea how telescopes manage to time travel backwards but it will be interesting to watch.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace prize winner, has died aged 90. A contemporary of Nelson Mandela, he was was one of the driving forces behind the movement to end the policy of apartheid enforced by the white minority government against the black majority in South Africa from 1948 until 1991.

  He was born on 7 October 1931 in Klerksdorp, no birth time, with a Methodist preacher father who had a drink problem. He had the notably tough, resourceful and innovative Saturn in Capricorn opposition Pluto square Uranus of the time opposing his Libra Sun and Venus, so he was custom-built to make a difference. His Jupiter in upbeat Leo (and Moon) squared an ultra-determined Mars in Scorpio and trined Uranus so he wouldn’t be scared to take risks.

  He always said his motives were religious and not political and he didn’t believe in violent protest. After Mandela became South Africa’s first black president in 1994, Tutu was appointed by him to a Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up to investigate crimes committed by both whites and blacks during the apartheid era. He was also credited with coining the term Rainbow Nation to describe the ethnic mix of post-apartheid South Africa, but in his latter years he expressed regret that the nation had not coalesced in the way in which he had dreamt.

 He had a reforming and capable 5^th Harmonic; a well-aspected ‘seeking soul’ 7H; and an encouraging leaving-a-legacy-for-history 17H.

  When the new South Africa was born on 27 April 1994 11am in Pretoria, his rebellious Uranus fell on its Midheaven fittingly enough. His Mars was conjunct the South Africa Jupiter for a confident new beginning; though his Pluto opposition the SA Uranus Neptune in Capricorn might have given pause for concern as he grew increasingly concerned about the direction the country went in later years.

Happy festivities – I hope everyone has some fun despite the panic and confusion around. Stay safe and well.

  The Red Kite in mythology is sacred to Isis, the sky goddess of magic and wisdom, and integral to the quest for resurrection. In Shakespeare’s time they were as common as crows, scavenging round London for food and stealing clothes off washing lines. In the 20^th Century they were on the edge of extinction until a reintroduction programme brought them back to rural skies in abundance.

  Above the fields beyond where I live now on the edge of Cambridgeshire, they swoop and soar in groups of a dozen or more. With a five foot wing span they are quite a sight.   

Joan Didion, the literary icon who chronicled the fragmentation of 60s and 70s American culture in her reporting and was a successful screenwriter and novelist as well has died. The 1976 film A Star Is Born was one of her credits and she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking about her own grief following the death of her husband.

Critics said of her:

“In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure.”

“She was perfectly matched to the times, with her slightly paranoid, slightly hysterical, high-strung sensibility. It was a perfect conjunction of the writer with the moment.”

“Everywhere she went she found the identical set of circumstances: looming chaos, an atmosphere saturated with dread and absurdities described by unwitting participants in clichéd language indicated by quotation marks.”

“She always seems to be writing on the brink of a catastrophe so awful that her only available response is to withdraw into a kind of autism.”

“I have a theatrical temperament,” she once told an interviewer.

  Born 5 December 1934 5.55pm Sacramento, California, with an Army Air Corp father she was constantly moved around as a child and had a fractured education. None of which stopped her winning a Vogue essay prize at college and subsequent Vogue magazine job. She married John Gregory Dunne, another journalist, who moved with her into movie writing and fiction.

  She did have a workaholic, driven and quite tortured chart. Her New Moon in Sagittarius fell in her hard-working 6^th house conjunct her Venus and square a creative Neptune. But it is her Mercury in penetrating Scorpio which is spotlighted with a trine to Pluto and sextile to a 4^th house Mars, square Saturn in Aquarius and inconjunct Uranus. She was not a lady who saw life through rose-coloured glasses or took it lightly. Her Jupiter in the performing 5^th house was sparsely aspected with one sextile to Neptune. Such a Jupiter tends to be less sociable, tending towards an ivory tower temperament and more weighted down by life.

  Her writer’s 21^st Harmonic was exceptionally strong; as was her genius/breakthrough 13H; and successful if not always happy 19H.

  Her husband John Gregory Dunne, 25 May 1932 8am Hartford, CT, a Sun Gemini with Aquarius Moon, was a cool companion so not a match of passion. Although they stayed married for forty years it was by no means and easy match with a composite Mars Pluto square Uranus in their relationship chart. Though there was also a creative composite Sun opposition Neptune which may have allowed them to gloss over the rougher patches.

Further thoughts from reviewers to better understand how her chart manifested:

“She was, famously and by her own account, diffident, brittle, runtish, prone to migraines, afraid of the telephone.

I brought her biscuits and, handing them over at the door, she looked down at the package as if I’d passed her a rattlesnake. It’s an effect of chain-reading Didion that small moments become overburdened with spurious meaning and, recalling that scene, it seems to me that when she looked back up at me, it was with an expression that indicated, simultaneously, she was touched by the gesture and that, if we were honest, we might also acknowledge it as gaucheness amounting to lunacy.”

“Joan Didion was 5 years old when she wrote her first story, upon the instruction of her mother, who had told her to stop whining and to write down her thoughts. She amused herself by describing a woman who imagines she is about to freeze to death, only to die burning instead. “I have no idea what turn of a 5-year-old’s mind could have prompted so insistently ‘ironic’ and exotic a story,” she later wrote. “It does reveal a certain predilection for the extreme which has dogged me into adult life.”

“The case for the prosecution has been her snobbery, self-absorption, humourlessness, conservatism and overweening privilege.”

“I don’t know what falling in love means,” she told her husband. “It’s not part of my world.”

She wrote: “I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package,” she once wrote. “I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”

Pic: David Shankbone.       

Russia is fast winding up to become the west’s bogeyman again as it masses military might and nuclear capabilities in the Arctic in a bid to secure its northern coast and open up a key shipping route from Asia to Europe, as well as pose a threat to Northern American coastal areas. It has also scaled up its military resources on its Western border with Ukraine and Eastern Europe, with Putin warning NATO/USA to back off. The EU has also allowed itself to be hemmed in by Putin over the indispensable Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline which will be effective leverage to stop any EU repercussions against his military forays.

  His 4^th Term chart always did have an air of ruthlessness about it with a composite Mars Pluto in Capricorn in the 6^th, which as I recollect is a mundane house ruling the armed forces. That conjunction won’t move to exact by Solar Arc until 2023 but is ramping up with tr Pluto conjunct the Mars now and through 2022. That last can also accompany a sense of being trapped which may reflect the internal situation in Russia.

  Through 2022 tr Uranus will conjunct the Putin’s Term Sun from late May onwards for sudden changes of direction which will go along with luck and an adventurous/risk-taking streak as tr Uranus is also opposition the Jupiter.  It sits on the Jupiter from July to mid October, returning in 2023. So it’ll be a pro-active year. Where his grip on power moves into a shakier patch will be in 2023/2024 with tr Pluto square the 10^th house Uranus.

  The Bank of Russia, 13 July 1990, does look stressed this year from May onwards with a catastrophic tr Pluto square the Mars in 2023/24 to fall in line with other global central banks. Economic pressures may unsettle Putin’s plans.

  The Russia 8 November 1917 2.12 am chart will be depressed in January with tr Saturn square the Sun and then Mercury; and rocked by tr Uranus in opposition from late April onwards into early 2023 so a year of sudden lurches, jolts and changes.  These roll through into 2023 with tr Uranus square the Uranus next year as well. Nothing will be settled.

  The Russia 8 December 1991 chart is showing odd ripples of discomfort but it is really 2023 when it gears up for a major turnaround, with a hint of a financial bubble bursting late in 2022 as well.

  Relations with the USA will be stressed and undermined in 2022/23. That shows up on the relationship charts with both old and new Russia with tensions running on until the 2025 planetary shift of Neptune and Uranus into new signs. Ditto with NATO.

  With Ukraine the high-pressure years with Russia will be 2023/2024. Though the Ukraine chart itself is having a confidence-denting 2022 from May onwards.

  There will be ripples of discontent and perhaps a reset of diplomatic ties with the EU and Germany in 2022 with tensions and disappointment running on till 2024.

  The USA is the most obviously perturbed by Russia.

The winter Solstice (in the Northern Hemisphere) brings with it the Capricorn Ingress which is one of the four entry points through the year of the Sun into a Cardinal sign.

  Capricorn has a duality which is not reflected in its standard interpretation as a coldly ambitious and materialistic sign. The old glyph was of a goat fish, so able to move in both in the realms of Water and of Earth, able to dive deep into the unconscious to come up with imaginative ideas and make them real on dry land. Creative and practical.  It is also associated with Janus, the two-faced god – not duplicitous, but able to look back over the year that has been and forward to the one that is coming. A stander on the threshold.

In theory the Ingress chart  shows the theme of the months ahead, though there is debate about which of the four in the year works best.   Last December’s Capricorn Ingress had the frustrating, scary, trapped Mars square Pluto, a confused Moon Neptune and a high tension Saturn square Uranus – which sounds reasonably descriptive.  

  Most notable about this Ingress is an emotionally intense Moon opposition Venus Pluto hinting that feelings will run high. The Saturn square Uranus is still in place but it mercifully lacks the blocked Mars Pluto. And there is a smidgeon more Jupiter around – sextile the Sun and square Mars for a surge of uplifting enthusiasm.

Cross the spine-chilling intrigues of King Henry V111’s court and Arabian Nights and you get a whiff of the atmosphere around the £500,000 divorce of Princess Haya, daughter of King Hussein of Jordan, and the youngest of six wives of Sheikh Maktoum,  billionaire ruler of Dubai.  

  She fled Dubai in 2019 saying she was in fear of her life, after discovering the Sheikh had previously abducted two of his daughters – Latifa and Shamsa – and rendered them back to Dubai against their will. Though the affair she had with a British ex-military bodyguard may have soured the marital mood as well. The bodyguard and other security staff blackmailed her, threatening to expose the affair which cost her seven million pounds.

  Princess Haya alleged her husband was trying to marry off her 14 year old daughter to Mohammed Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.

  She had claimed £1.4 billion to keep up the lifestyle she was accustomed to, running two multi-million pound properties in the UK and though she got less there is still plenty to cover a substantial “security budget” as well as holidays, salaries and accommodation for a nurse and a nanny, armoured vehicles for the family, and the cost of maintaining various ponies and pets.

  The divorce judge didn’t mince his words about the threats she and the two children faced from Sheikh Al-Maktoum, prime minister of the UAE, influential horse-racing owner and erstwhile friend of the Queen.

  It takes a fair amount of nerve/courage to face up to this situation and push through a stratospheric divorce claim. She was born 3 May 1974 in Jordan, and is a stalwart Sun Mercury in Taurus; with a hard-edged, used-to-scary-situations Mars Saturn in Cancer square Pluto Moon in Libra; with a hopeful Jupiter square Neptune, trine Mars and sextile Sun. She has a steely core.

  It was never going to be an ideal match with her Uranus squaring the Sheikh’s Cancer Sun and her Mars Saturn conjunct his Mercury Uranus in Cancer with her Pluto Moon square – so she was always going to bolt at some point.

  His chart, 15 July 1949, assuming the birth date is sound, is not quite as barbaric as his actions sound so it will presumably be the houses which root him in a mediaeval past.

  She has a rocky road ahead with her Solar Arc Sun Mercury conjunct her Saturn, square her Pluto and then conjunct her Mars for several years up to the end of the decade.

  Add obscene quantities of money to Royals and plant it in the Age of the Tudors you have a tale stranger than fiction.

See Previous post March 6 2020; August 18 2018.