Astrology blog
Planets, houses and aspects in plain language — from your first chart to a year-ahead forecast.
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
GuidesNadia opens a third browser tab. The first article said the Scorpio birthstone is topaz, and showed a glowing pinkish-orange imperial topaz the colour of late autumn sun. The second said it's citrine, the bright lemon-yellow stone, with a brief footnote that citrine was added to the November list...
Oksana Miatova22 min
GuidesSomewhere around your birthday, the Sun returns to the exact spot in the zodiac it sat at the minute you were born. A solar return chart is the snapshot of the whole sky at that moment — and astrologers read it as a one-year theme map running from this birthday to the next. It isn't always on you...
Oksana Miatova15 min
CompatibilityIt's a Wednesday lunchtime, café near the office. Maya, queueing at the till, is texting a friend about Sam — fellow journalist, fellow byline on the long investigation they've been running for six weeks. Long meetings, late edits, the kind of working intimacy that creeps in without anyone naming...
Oksana Miatova14 min
Birth-time rectificationYou sit down to build your birth chart, the form asks for your time of birth, and you stall. Maybe there's nothing written down. Maybe there's a number, but your mum shrugs and says "sometime in the morning, I think." Maybe the certificate in the drawer has a date and no time at all.
Oksana Miatova11 min
GuidesThree friends, three different January birthdays, three different Chinese zodiac animals — and at least one of them looked it up on a different website and got a different answer. Somewhere in that confusion is a real question: what are the Chinese zodiac signs by year, how do you find yours, and...
Oksana Miatova18 min
GuidesSix different sites will tell you an Aquarius is independent, intellectual, humanitarian, eccentric and a little aloof — usually in the same order, often in the same words. If you're an Aquarius and you've read those lists thinking "that's only half right, and the half that fits doesn't fit all t...
Oksana Miatova13 min
CompatibilityA Wednesday in late October. The Aquarius partner is on the sofa with a laptop and the document she's been editing on and off for three weeks — a climate report for a charity she advises. The Sagittarius partner is on the floor next to a half-disassembled bicycle, the second of two he's restoring...
Oksana Miatova17 min
GuidesIf someone asked you, over coffee, what astrology actually is, you'd probably know roughly what to say — but only roughly. Most of us have absorbed a vague mix of horoscope columns, Instagram bios, and a friend's confident pronouncements about Mercury retrograde. None of it quite adds up to a cle...
Oksana Miatova23 min
HousesYou looked at your birth chart, saw twelve numbered wedges around the wheel, and someone told you those were the houses. You opened a guide to find out what they meant, and were handed twelve paragraphs in a row, each one describing a different house as though it had a personality of its own. By ...
Oksana Miatova14 min
CompatibilityShe has held a paint chip the colour of warm clay against the living-room wall for a fortnight. He would like to put four shortlisted swatches up for one more week, just to see how they sit in the morning light versus the evening. Neither of them has raised a voice. Neither of them is being unrea...
Oksana Miatova18 min
CompatibilitySomeone types «dinner tonight?» to their new Capricorn partner. The reply comes back forty minutes later: a shared calendar invite for next Saturday at seven, with a small note that he's already checked the weather and booked. The Aries reads the message twice. It's not a no, but it isn't a yes e...
Oksana Miatova13 min