Author: Jem Neal

Chirotic Journal

Pluto and the Riddle of Gold

One of the fundamental challenges of our lives is that we are habituated to living in existential dread. That is to say that we are all, to one extent or another, aware of the blissful consequence of living in the moment, and every one of us, at some time or another has experienced those happy glimpses of eternity wherein there is no future and no past, and we find ourselves bathed in contentment, without a care in the world. As children, assuming a certain quality of care and comfort, we retain few memories, because trauma aside, our sense impressions are...
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Seven Habits for the Saturn – Pluto Year

If you read my last piece then we will both agree, it had a bleak tone. That is natural astrology, or astrology unvarnished, which is different from new age astrology. Part of the conundrum of the evolutionary ideals of contemporary stellar mechanics is that it must, in some quarters at least, always have a positive tone. This is nonsense, because it ignores the missing component: you. A positive outcome cannot be guaranteed, but your approach to the prevailing conditions will greatly facilitate an increased likelihood of one. What this means in miniature, is that the bleakness of Saturn Pluto is...
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Musings on Saturn-Pluto

The arc of Pluto, as I have discussed many times before now, is always toward unknowing. Like anything shut away from air and light for too long, it might turn, and become a blight that slowly poisons the host from deep within. For this reason, the darkness of Pluto’s domain must be broached to allow... Continue Reading →

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The Story of Vesta: pt. I

Fire is essential to human life. Water is too, and earth to build all things material, and air to breathe. Of all of these though, fire is the most ephemeral, because we might live without it. But we cannot live well without it. In earlier times, when fearsome beasts roamed the land, fire ensured, light and warmth and safety. Fire is embedded deep in our DNA, because it brought humankind out of the dark, and into the sheltering, protective penumbra of the tribe. It was symbolic of belonging. And in perhaps only the last 200 years has fire become relegated...
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Aspects in Balance

Here is another perspective too on the nature of Jupiter and Saturn, and the received wisdom about those planets. Specifically, it allows us to reframe the simplistic idea that Jupiter is good, and Saturn is bad. It is better to say that Jupiter is easy, and Saturn is hard. But as we all know, a smooth sea never made a skilled sailor, and it is commonly held by almost everyone, that while they did not choose the great hardships and challenges of their lives, they would invariably not choose after the fact, to have not lived through them. Often, the...
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Vladimir Nabokov: No Rest for the Wicked?

Vladimir Nabokov was a sensitive and complex man. Highly intelligent and with an exotic past he was born into the Russian aristocracy before being forced, in fear of his life to flee his homeland in the 1917 revolution and spent his remaining years wandering the earth, never truly finding his home. He is best known for his novel Lolita; about the foolish love a middle-aged man has for a young girl. It is a taboo subject. Nabokov wrote it very skilfully, and the book is perceived to be a moral tale which exposes the cruel tragedy of its protagonist’s...
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The Astrology of Healing

Feature image: A Visit to Aesculapius 1880 Sir Edward Poynter 1836-1919 Aesculapius is identified by the snake curled around a staff. In a scene taken from a poem by the Elizabethan Thomas Watson, Poynter shows him being consulted by Venus who has a thorn in her foot. Venus is identified by the doves, which are... Continue Reading →

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The Other Side of Paradise

If it is true to say that there are, in an esoteric, but nonetheless verifiable manner, no ‘easy’ aspects, then this ought to be simply demonstrable; let us find a chart which evinces no hard aspects, and gaze agog at the cosmic realisation that perhaps we have been looking at the entire puzzle of the nativity from a flawed perspective; that rather than seeing things in a binary manner, as in good versus bad, what we are instead witnessing are stylistically differing itineraries leading to a common destination. To digress for an instant: in spiritual terms we are all engaged...
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The Law of Karma

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle. F. Scott Fitzgerald   Is it possible to have too much of a good thing? Whilst we all tend towards disparaging our ill-fortune, I think we would all agree that suffering does indeed build character, and that those who have endured considerable hardship are often the first to engage life with empathy, compassion and kindness. True, it is not always the case. There are many who, unable to rise above their...
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