Though the uninitiated may be intimidated by, if not downright skeptical of, the apparent mysticism of astrology, Anne’s practical approach makes learning and interpreting the signs of the zodiac more accessible, even to a complete novice. (Gary Gomez)

This piece is written for members of the general public with an open-minded interest in astrology – and for fellow astrologers who may well recognise elements of their own journey "from sceptic to astrologer".

I'm really happy today to be have my work featured again on Astrodienst: offering a somewhat different 'take' – going back over 200 years– on the remarkable Cradle or Grail pattern ('Barbault's Basket') in the heavens right now...

This is a question I've been asked many times over the years: in an idle wander through my Astrology: Questions and Answers archives, I came across a fascinating occasional series I had done called Becoming an Astrologer: Leading Astrologers Tell All, from which I thought it would be interesting and illuminating to feature several astrologers' fascinating and very varied responses to this beguiling question.

With natal Mars in my tenth house at 1.5 degrees of Cancer, the last year or so with Saturn AND Neptune in Aries squaring that Mars in Cancer has been a stagger to the sofa, a cup of tea, a good book, a digestive biscuit and a long snooze...

The Birth Chart or Horoscope suggests strongly that we come into this world, characters already on the stage poised to live out our life's drama...

The Birth Chart or Horoscope suggests strongly that we come into this world, not as tabulae rasae (blank slates) but with certain characters on the stage poised to live out a complex drama as the process of our life unfolds from birth to death.

Buddhist wisdom considers dealing with adversity as the process of “Forging the Diamond Soul”. I found meditating on this a great support in some very hard times, both past and recently...

How I wish people would spend some time in studying subjects which have been a vital part of human experience for thousands of years, rather than displaying their profound ignorance of those very subjects, eg Astrology, in the public realm.

Synchronicity is such an interesting, only partially explicable phenomenon.

I had to let go of trying too hard to understand the material presented by Dr Liz Greene in "The Astrological World of Jung's 'Liber Novus' " from a purely rational perspective, and allow myself at least partly to be drawn into the territory of the Imaginal...

I am feeling very very 12th house-y at present – most apt for the very very end of the current Saturn Neptune cycle ..

I am feeling very very 12th house-y at present – most apt for the very very end of the current Saturn Neptune cycle which began in 1989 with the people-power assisted collapse of the Berlin Wall and major political re-alignments...

The twelfth house is the final and most mystical sector of the zodiac wheel, traditionally associated with Pisces and the planet Neptune. The "phases" (transits and progressions) through this house are typically times of inner work and transition, before a new cycle begins with planets crossing into the first house. 

The question of whether it is possible to foretell the future is one which has preoccupied humans ever since we evolved into self-conscious beings and began to conceptualise past, present, and future — now thought to be around 80,000 years ago. Prediction has been around for a long time. Economists do it. Weather forecasters do it. Politicians do it. Physicists do it. Futurologists do it. Most of the foregoing predictors direct scorn and derision at the people who have done it for longer than anyone else: astrologers...

"...Every so often, someone asks me what I think my job as an astrologer is. It’s a good question – it makes me ‘return to base’, as it were, and set out the basics again, both for the questioner – and for my own benefit."

In honour of Hallowe'en 2025, here are just two of those occasions in which my fundamentally rational, sceptical self was challenged to consider the existence of levels of 'reality' outwith the normal spectrum – experiences which send the reductionists into a lather of (non-rational!) fury...

"...We are in a unique time now: not only humanity, but the whole of Mother Earth and all her creatures great and small are suffering the pain and turbulence of increasing chaos as the old order loses its grip. But without Neptune to dissolve the deadening rigidities of Saturn past its sell-by date in any phase of civilisation or culture, life could not go on. 

I am intrigued by Carl Jung’s notion, set forth in his essay ‘The Sign of the Fishes’ (iv) that when world ages change, ie when the first point of Aries can be seen against the backdrop of the next…

"...The constant dance between form and formlessness, being and non-being, order and chaos, occurs in all epochs and at all levels...Astrology has its own language for this struggle, speaking through the polarity of Saturn and Neptune. .."

We are currently entering a world turned upside down – the evidence from wars raging in the bigger picture, to storm tossed personal lives of those who are plugged into the current planetary shifts, is everywhere...

What does Chiron mean to you? Have you experienced his symbolic energy as healing? Wounding? As the ‘inconvenient benefic’, kicking open doors to places you’d never have thought to go? Or have you simply not given him much thought?

I have always loved August, that month where a particular coolness in the morning air on stepping out, a papery rustle tingeing the wind blowing through the trees, intimates that Summer is losing its hold upon the year, that Autumn is ascending…

Currently, we are being tossed around worldwide in yet another Twelfth House phase: that of the Saturn/Neptune cycle which began in Capricorn in early November 1989, accompanying the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the fall of Communism. The new cycle of that contradictory planetary pair begins fully at 0 Aries in late February 2026.

I’ve never forgotten Dr Liz Greene, in one of her seminars at the Centre for Psychological Astrology during the 1990s, making a remark to the effect that it is truly astounding the lengths to which the Fates seem to be prepared to go to arrange life-changing encounters for people, sometimes right across continents...

This very interesting and enlightening experiment does not of course constitute any kind of proof: but it bore out my impressions from reading about the similarities and differences in the lives of…

It's been my pleasure recently to drop in and have a listen to a most enjoyable, accessible, thoughtful and informative new podcast, Lunar Reflections with Heliodora and Tarah...

I’ve been an astrologer now for decades. But the synchronicities invariably revealed through its symbols between the microcosm of our tiny lives and the vast planetary macrocosm of which we a…

I've been an astrologer now for decades. But the synchronicities invariably revealed through its symbols between the microcosm of our tiny lives and the vast planetary macrocosm of which we are part, never ceases to make me feel humbled – and often amazed. 'As above, so below', indeed...

The Astrological Journal May 2025 67.3

I often get asked about the effect of the transits of the ‘Big Heavies’ ie Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, over the IC or root/origin point of the horoscope. Here is my story of life-changing experiences occurring when the Big Heavies all crossed that point in my horoscope during my twenties, thirties and forties. And - I'm still here!

Stellar is a FREE Online Astrology Magazine, the online multi-media publication aimed at the vast global audience interested in astrology.

We had a big Summer Solstice/10th Anniversary celebration on Saturday 21st June afternoon in Glasgow G20, with wonderful weather – interspersed of course ( this is the West of Scotland...!) with the occasional downpour. It didn't stop us having a wonderful time celebrating our vibrant local community.

Discover how my blog climbed to Number 2 in the Top 15 UK Astrology Blogs and my plans for SEO improvements ahead. Stay tuned!

The Chancellor is reviewing all public spending from scratch. The arts make our lives happier and our communities stronger. Now is the moment to invest in them.

Practitioners of both the hard sciences and the symbolic arts are considering the same vast energy field, and attempting to describe in different but essentially complementary ways, those mysteriou…

The old order changeth, yielding place to new… You would have to be hiding under a rock somewhere very remote without wifi not to have noticed the above, aptly summed up by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in hi...

For the first 27 years of my life I was a scornful astro-dismisser, this stance typically based on the wrong assumption that popular astrology eg ‘…You’re a Gemini, I’m Scorpio so we won’t get on…' tells the whole story of an ancient and complex art and science going back millennia.