Astro Blog
by Adrian Duncan | Aug 19, 2011 | Adrian's Articles 2011
King George VI (Note 1) died in 1952 without a male heir, whereupon his eldest daughter Elizabeth became queen at the tender age of 25 on February 6th. The coronation over a year later on June 2nd, 1953 was the first mass-televised event (against Winston Churchill’s advice and at Elizabeth’s insistence) with three million people lining the streets of London.
Clearly the powers that be had a sense of timing those days, for the horoscope for the coronation, which took place shortly after 11 a.m., had Leo rising (probably on the King’s star Regulus at 29 Leo), with the ruling sun conjoining Jupiter in the 10th house. You can’t get finer than that, and the exact trine from the Sun to the Moon in Aquarius in the 6th (we, the people, her loyal servants) has ensured her popularity for almost 60 years now. …Read More
by Adrian Duncan | Aug 14, 2011 | Adrian's Articles 2011
Whilst we can be sure that Arnold Schwarzenegger will be back despite his love child with the family maid, things look a bit more worrying for Dominique Strauss-Kahn who was arrested under humiliating circumstances for allegedly forcing sex on a hotel maid. He was escorted off a plane to Paris on Saturday 14th May, handcuffed and interrogated by New York police, imprisoned and presented in court on the following money and sent back to the notorious Rikers Island jail immediately afterwards. Two weeks would go by before he was given bail, which means he is confined to a New York apartment and has to wear an electronic bracelet and finance a security company to guard him and re-arrest if necessary. …Read More
by Adrian Duncan | Aug 13, 2011 | Adrian's Articles 2011
The entry of Neptune into Pisces here in March 2011 is an amazing event…
The first time it has happened since Neptune’s discovery in 1846 and subsequent entry in Pisces in 1848, which was a year of social revolution all around the world. Neptune in Aquarius, the sign it entered back in 1998, brought the vast virtual world of the internet to people worldwide, ending with the phenomenon of social networking and Facebook “friends”. This was the period when virtually everyone bought a mobile phone, even in so-called undeveloped countries, and united across time and space.
…Read More
by Adrian Duncan | Aug 12, 2011 | Adrian's Articles 2011
If you think it would be fun to be royalty, it might be worth considering the case of the Duke of York who came to the throne on December 11th, 1936 (after his brother decided to abdicate to remain together with the twice-divorced Wallace Simpson). As George VI he reigned during the war years, and fathered Britain’s current monarch Queen Elizabeth II. He is therefore the great-grandfather of the soon-to-be-married Prince William.
The story of King George VI has been wonderfully portrayed in the recent film “The King’s Speech”, which received four Academy Awards here in 2011. The young George had a terrible stammer, and, required by public duty to make speeches all over the realm, he suffered terribly from the embarrassment and frustration that ensued – as did his audiences. The film is about how he sought the services of a speech therapist called Lionel Logue (played by Geoffrey Rush), and the charm of the film is in how Logue refused to compromise his integrity as a therapist and insisted on treating the king as an equal. …Read More
by Adrian Duncan | Aug 7, 2011 | Adrian's Articles 2010
The end of the world is coming… it’s a sure thing. Certainly within 100 years, you will no longer be able to read this, because you will be dead and gone. It is quite a worrisome thing of course, but humans have a wonderful ability to forget their coming demise, on the surface at least. …Read More
by Adrian Duncan | Aug 7, 2011 | Adrian's Articles 2010
Once upon a time, nobody had a problem with astrology. It had always been part of the curriculum at major learning institutions until the Renaissance because people simply felt the harmony between man and cosmos. Looking at the magic movement of the planets over the bright, night sky, whilst the stars stayed still and the moon went from new to full, there was a sense of connection between earthly and heavenly developments. The basic principle of astrology is that the smallest thing in the universe is subject to the same process as the largest. The same rules apply to both, and an action in one sphere will reflect an action in another. Major practitioners of religions like Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism developed systems for interpreting planetary configurations and astrology evolved into a huge body of knowledge. …Read More
by Adrian Duncan | Aug 7, 2011 | Adrian's Articles 2009
Back in the 1980’s I had a formative experience as an astrologer, which arose from the visit of a rather difficult client. She had Pisces rising and her grasp of reality and especially relationships was very tenuous – or so it seemed to me. She was convinced that she was being constantly followed by men. I was convinced that this was a product of her imagination and tried to explain the projection mechanisms of her chart ruler Neptune, which was exactly in conjunction with her Descendant. …Read More
by Adrian Duncan | Aug 7, 2011 | Adrian's Articles 2009
THE FUTURE FOR IRAN
At the time of writing – four days after the chaotic Iranian election on June 12th 2009 – there are still wild protests on the streets of Teheran and other major cities, as supporters of candidate Mousavi demand that there be an accounting for their disappeared votes. An estimated ½ to 1½ million people have taken to the streets in defiance of a ban on demonstrations, the current president Ahmadinejad has mobilized the feared Revolutionary Guard militia, and at the last counting seven people have been shot and killed. …Read More
by Adrian Duncan | Aug 7, 2011 | Adrian's Articles 2009
In life there is what we think happens, and what actually happens. What actually happens is difficult, if not impossible, to establish objectively. There is a Russian proverb that says, “Never trust an eye witness”, and this theme has often been explored by artists and film directors. The most recent may be Vantage Point (2008), which is a film directed by Peter Travis in which a presidential assassination is recalled by six different witnesses. Their combined stories finally reveal the true story. In Kurosawa’s film Rashomon (1950), four different people recount different versions of the murder of a man and the rape of his wife, but in this case no objectively truthful version is established. In the last analysis “truth” is not absolute, but something arrived at by consensus, and this makes the cultural environment we are brought up in a crucial factor in how we all agree about reality. It is the very nature of the mind that makes it difficult to establish so-called objective truth. Even perception itself via the five senses is altered by various universal human factors. The mind has an inbuilt tendency to generalize experience, jumping to conclusions from a very limited sensory input, in the same way that on a film set, there is no need to present more than the facade of a building to trick the mind into thinking the building exists. When we learn from a very early age to put names to an object, this too removes us one more step from actually experiencing that object. And when we access our memory to relate to a repeated experience, then memory again removes us from direct experience. …Read More
by Adrian Duncan | Aug 7, 2011 | Adrian's Articles 2009
When I arrived in Herat, the most easterly city in Afghanistan, in June 1970, it was, or seemed to be, an idyllic kingdom, ruled by a king called Zahir Shah. Coming from the oppressive desert of Iran, with an equally oppressive regime, it was like entering heaven from hell. Suddenly there was music in the air, colorful horses and carriages ringing with bells, and people selling their wares to young people on the hippy trail… and many people enjoying those wares. Cool, friendly, laid-back, with little trace of extremist religion. Behind the scenes the religious fundamentalists chafed under the reforms the king had instituted under the years, and, as always, in the mountainous areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan, most men bore weapons, which could be bought in the local markets. Afghanistan has a reputation for being able to look after itself, as the British discovered in 1842. At this time they sent out an expeditionary force of 16,000 men from India to pacify Kabul. These men were slaughtered in less than a week, and one man lived to tell the tale.The Soviet Union were also ultimately defeated in the 1980’s by Afghanistan resistance, which had considerable support from the USA in the form of advanced anti-aircraft missiles, conventional arms and dollars. Osama bin Laden was a prominent recipient of this support. A complete withdrawal of Soviet forces took place under Gorbatchev on February 15th 1989, with Mujahideen attacks wreaking havoc on Soviet troops until the last moment. The transition of Afghanistan from a kingdom to a divided state started with the overthrow of the king on July 17th 1973 by his brother in law, Daoud Khan, who established a republic. …Read More
