Astrology blog
Planets, houses and aspects in plain language — from your first chart to a year-ahead forecast.
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Three websites, three slightly different dates for the same sign. One friend swears she's "such a typical Capricorn", another tells you Capricorns are nothing like her. Somewhere in the middle, you'd quite like to know what the twelve zodiac signs actually are, where the dates come from, and whet...
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Blog categories
How to build and read your chart from your birth date
Synastry: Venus, Mars and the Moon in a couple
Forecasts, transits and retrograde planets
The influence of the Moon, Venus, Saturn and others
What the 12 houses of the natal chart govern
The Destiny Matrix and your birth-date number
Service comparisons and step-by-step walkthroughs
HoroscopesThree apps, three slightly different verdicts. Astrostyle tells you to channel your bold Mars energy; Elle UK says today is about embracing your inner fire; Cafe Astrology mentions a Moon-Saturn square but doesn't quite translate what that means for an Aries. You're an Aries, you read your horosc...
Oksana Miatova14 min
CompatibilityIt is 11:53pm. The takeaway menus are still open on the kitchen counter. He said "I genuinely don't mind, you choose". She said "no really, you choose". This is the third evening this week that has finished without anyone choosing the restaurant, and neither of them is sure whether that is sweet ...
Oksana Miatova16 min
GuidesThe Pisces symbol — ♓ — is two fish, tied at the tail, swimming in opposite directions. If you've ever seen it on a horoscope page or on someone's wrist as a tattoo and thought "two fish, fine, but why are they tied together, and why facing away", you weren't being slow. The geometry is the meani...
Oksana Miatova11 min
Birth-time rectificationYou've probably been handed two flatly opposite answers. One friend insists you can't read a chart at all without an exact time, and treats a missing minute like a missing limb. Another waves it away: signs are signs, the rest is fuss, just enjoy your Scorpio season. Both of them are half right, ...
Oksana Miatova9 min
CompatibilityThree horoscope sites can read Cancer and Scorpio and come back with "soulmates", "watch the possessiveness", and "difficult match", each writer perfectly confident. They aren't lying. They're all looking at the same one tenth of the chart and filling in the rest with mood. Astrological birth cha...
Oksana Miatova17 min
GuidesMaya is thirty-one. People keep asking what she's doing now, and she keeps answering with a line out of her CV, as if she were reading the side of a tin. The honest thing, the thing she doesn't say aloud, is that she's been answering that way since university. Long before the divorce, long before...
Oksana Miatova19 min
GuidesAnna opens a third browser tab. The first article said the Libra birthstone is opal. The second listed eight stones — opal, rose quartz, lapis lazuli, sapphire, tourmaline, peridot, jade, citrine — all apparently «the Libra stone». The third was firm: «Sapphire, if you were born in September, eve...
Oksana Miatova20 min
CompatibilityIt's a Wednesday evening writing group in the upstairs room of a small London pub. Ten regulars on a long table, two pages each. You hand yours to your neighbour — tall, mid-thirties, soft jumper, careful pencil — and read his. By the end of the round you have both underlined the same paragraph i...
Oksana Miatova17 min
GuidesIt is nine on a Wednesday in October. A 34-year-old woman in Manchester is sitting at her parents' kitchen table, three months after her divorce was finalised, in the slow logistical middle of finding her own flat. A mug of herbal tea has gone cold beside a notebook with two underlined words, *wh...
Oksana Miatova20 min
CompatibilityShe wants to know whether they're moving in together. He answers, easily, by suggesting a long weekend in Porto, as though those two questions belong on the same shelf. Both think they have engaged. Neither has heard the other. By Tuesday the conversation about the flat has gone quiet, and he is,...
Oksana Miatova13 min
GuidesHannah opens a third browser tab. The first article said the Taurus birthstone is emerald. The second listed ten stones — emerald, rose quartz, jade, lapis lazuli, sapphire, peridot, garnet, citrine, malachite, tiger's eye, all apparently «the Taurus stone». The third was quieter and stranger: «E...
Oksana Miatova23 minNumerologyA friend mentions in passing that her life path is 7, and it explains everything. You type "numerology" into Google and land on a calculator that hands you back a number with three lines of description and no clue where the number came from. You're not entirely sure whether numerology is the same...
Oksana Miatova22 min