What is astrology? Astrology is a language of symbols. Astrological birth charts are maps of a person's life purpose laid out in this coded language. A chart is derived from the arrangement of planets in the sky at the exact time you were born, from the vantage point of the exact place you were born. Translating the symbolic configurations of…

Upon the inauguration of America’s new president, millions of people felt something extraordinary happen; something that went beyond a mere political victory party. It felt to many as if a flood of inspiration was unleashed —- not just in the USA, but, remarkably, all over the world – whose power astrologers chalk up not to a man winning an election,…

Troubled times have always been astrology's stock in trade. From the lunar calendars of Ice Age shamans to the glossy magazine horoscopes at the grocery store, in one form or another people have looked to the sky to explain their distresses, large and small. Throughout human history astrology has provided a spiritual constant.

As the month with the most buzz in the Western calendar, December is a worthy subject for astrological study. Let us take a look at what makes this time of year so highly charged, with the goal of opening up as fully as we can to its power. If we want to know what makes a month tick, the obvious…

All of us who read charts have at some point been spooked by transits of Mars. It is perhaps the most closely watched and most cursorily interpreted planet in transit astrology. Not known for subtlety, Mars' transits can be a revelation when they trigger more inscrutable underlying chart patterns, because with Mars something usually happens; something that we can point…

Secrets of Mercury Nicknamed "the lower mind" by medieval astrologers, Mercury doesn't get pursued very deeply in most interpretation. A planet whose governance includes such mundane activities as <b>walking, talking and thinking</b> is not often plumbed for existential meaning. Astrologer Robert Hand calls Mercury's operation "automatic thinking": the rote intelligence we use in everyday functioning.

To understand the fraught topic of American power metaphysically, we must first strip it of its connotations. Interpreting a chart is like painting a still life: if we want to truly observe the object, we start by forgetting what we think we know about it. What would most astrologers, using straight-out-of-the-textbook astrology, make of a Mercury-Pluto opposition, if they found…

Both skeptics and masters in the field will agree: astrology is not an exact science. It is a fluid, subtle symbolic system with interpretive results as varied as those who practice it. In the ancient world, when there was less distinction made between art and science, and none at all made between science and religion, astrology was considered a philosophical…

To early humans, the circularity of the life cycle was a given. Evidence from archaeological findings and creation stories the world over suggests a universal world view which held that all living things, human beings included, follow ever-repeating cycles: birth leads to death leads to rebirth. This, in a nutshell, is the law of Pluto. Before the sky-god religions (Judaism,…

Among the ten planets used in popular astrology, Saturn is far and away the most likely to get negative spin. Indeed, if we were trying to assign a planetary rulership to the concept of negativity itself, most astrologers would chalk it up to Saturn. But all this presumed malevolence has less to do with the planet’s essential meaning than with…