On the Soul's Terms

The podcast cover image is taken by the Rover on Mars, showing the rocky and cracked landscape of our twin planet, our big brother, serving as a reminder of what can happen on a planet if the shadows of Mars: Phobos and Demos (Panic and Terror) get out of hand.  Hovering above the land is a burning heart. That image came to Michael Meade in a dream and later became the cover for his new book, The...

Anadyomene is an ancient epithet connected to Aphrodite. It means ‘she who is rising up from the sea’ and refers to the moment in mythology, recorded for us by the shepherd, Hesiod, when the goddess of beauty is born from the ocean in the midst of unimaginable (yet thoroughly imagined) trauma.  It felt an apt title for this episode. Somewhere in the dreaming ocean of this conversation with Toko-pa...

Venus is the sphere in which we ponder Love, Beauty, Harmony, Pleasure, Value (and our Values) and Worth (and that niggling question, 'Am I Worthy?). In our chart she represents how you attract others, express affection, handle finances and appreciate the finer things in life.  In the current sky, Venus in Scorpio is retrograde and about to disappear from the evening sky. She's on her wa...

Venus in the sky is currently at her highest glory (elongation (distance from the sun)). That's the moment that, like Inanna, she hears the call from the Great Above to the Great Below and decides to descend. She moves through the seven gates, each gate demanding that she remove one of her signals of power in the upper realms.  Melanie Reinhart joins me to talk about her own observations of t...

Mercury is the smallest planet in our solar system, closest to the sun, taking a magical 88 days for a year. It travels fast but spins slowly – a day being 1.5 times as long as a year – with a quirky, egg-shaped orbit. Small with a big character. That kind of sums up mythical Hermes (Mercury) who, on the first day of his life, invents music, fire and ritual, steals Apollo's cattle and snuggle...

Today I’m joined by mentor, guide and friend of the podcast, Brian Clark.  It’s time to enter the world of Hermes, guide of souls, the one we meet on the road who can lead us away from home and lead us back when the time is right.  We begin our discussion by talking about mythological Hermes, tracing his origins back to Mycenaean culture where he was known as the ‘herma’ – a pile of rocks that we...

Spyros Siamos is an energy healer, esoteric author, and former mathematics teacher based in Messinia, Greece. He lives on a coastal olive grove situated near an ancient Temple of Apollo, where he conducts one-on-one healing sessions and hosts sound therapy, meditation, and spiritual workshops. A father of two and author of three books on esotericism, Spyros has explored various healing modalities...

Firstly I suppose I should say... *Spoiler Alert* Although let's face it, the story is over 3,000 years old. By now you should probably have heard of it.  Secondly, there is a Post Script here to listen out for. An 'after the credits' scene if you will. Definitely stay tuned for that part. It ties the episode together.  The episode itself has been brewing for the last month, since t...

Doing an episode on the sun, our central fiery point that takes up 99.86% of the mass of our solar system and gives the system itself a name, turned out to be quite the task.  Enormous, if you will.  I've always found that the Sun in astrology felt a little... flat. Two dimensional. It was though we were looking at the image with that singular eye that the sun conjures to our minds. The image...

The Moon pulls the tides of the ocean, but the question that won’t let us go is simpler and stranger: what is it pulling in us? Melanie Reinhart joins me for a wide, grounded, moonlit ramble through lunar consciousness, astrology, and the body. We start with the moon as a constant companion for earthlings, a reliable rhythm of waxing and waning that can steady us when life feels politically, perso...

The Planets Series begins with our closest and most intimate neighbour: the moon.  The moon represents the dreaming mind, our instinctive life and our guidance system to the emotional waves of our turbulent lives.  Each of these elements of the moon is explored in this episode with the help of three mythic figures: Selene as a personification of the moon riding her white cow through the sky, visit...

I disappeared for a few months, went a bit underground, and even partially relocated my life to Greece so I could be a little closer to the gods I keep talking about. Now I’m ready to return with something simple, specific, and surprisingly alive: a new astrology podcast series on the planets, approached as characters of the psyche rather than abstract symbols on a page. If the houses are the plac...

The series on the houses wouldn't have felt complete without one last fairytale.  In this, the 40th and last episode of the series, we explore the German tale of Dornröschen, which loosely translates to 'the little rose inside the thorns'.  It begins with a talking frog who crawls out of the water to deliver a prophecy to the bathing queen. And it takes us into those places in ourse...

My guest for this episode is... well... me! Astrologer Brian Clark interviews me, Chris Skidmore, in this episode as we look back on the journey that was the 12 Houses of Astrology. In no particular order, we move back through the images that captured our attention from the fairy tales, and revisit our 13 guests that helped us along the way.  Thank you to all of you who have come along with me in...

Melanie Reinhart joins me once more to speak into and from the 12th house of the wheel of houses. The episode itself is a wonderful example of how that which we talk about can sometimes be 'conjured up' by our speech. This is something that Gregory Bateson called a 'metalogue' - a word introduced to me by Melanie many moons ago.  Our metalogue was a disruption from the gods of...

The 12th and final house of astrology is often given a bad wrap. It's considered the house of hidden enemies and of our own undoing. It rules over places we'd rather not be such as prisons, hospitals and asylums. And yet, deep in this oceanic place in our charts we may meet the gods themselves. Figures from the collective unconscious who shape shift and morph, reveal and conceal themselv...

Part Two of our wanderings with Iron John/Hans. The episode begins with the moss bed made for the boy in the forest. Ryan shares soulful reflections on moss itself; known as a 'boundary layer' that draws moisture not from the ground up but from the air down. Moss forms little cups to gather water from the electricity in the air, which must be one of the most Aquarian/11th House symbols I...

Ryan Nielsen joins the podcast again (see episode 104 for our circuitous meanderings on Allerleirauh) to explore the Grimm tale of Iron John (or Iron Hans) whilst reflecting about the cusp between the known and unknown worlds (the 11th and 12th house cusp).  Iron John is a story that was made famous by the poet Robert Bly in the 1990s. It became the central story that he worked with in his book by...

Astrologer Jason Holley joins me again on the podcast today to delve into the 11th house - the house of groups, the polis, mass media, theatre, the audience, 'the people'. It’s a rich and far-reaching conversation that, we both felt, got right to the heart of this complex and often misunderstood house that takes us into the entangled world of collective consciousness.  Along the way we s...

What happens when personal destiny meets the wider world of friends, teams, and the public square? We dive into the Eleventh House as the arena where your hard‑won calling turns into collective contribution, guided by Aquarius’s twin rulers—Saturn, who sets the frame, and Uranus, who refreshes it. Along the way, we unpack how projection travels from siblings to partners to society, why the traits...

Michael Meade rejoins the podcast to discuss all things 11th house; the house of collective consciousness, groups, teams and the Polis: society at large. The 11th is where the great mystery occurs in the interaction between the individual cell and the whole organism.  Michael's words act as a steadying force in unsettling times. He brings us back to a sense of cohesion and collaboration, remi...

Calling doesn’t arrive as a neat job title. It asks for consent. In this deep, playful, and piercing conversation with Thomas Moore—author of Care of the Soul—we explore how the Midheaven (tenth house) points not to status but to a life that can bear its own meaning in public. Thomas shares how fifty years of quiet preparation—monastic study, Latin and Greek, music, Jung—suddenly opened into visib...

A tower without roots looks impressive until the wind picks up. We follow Rapunzel and The Six Swans to uncover how a real calling demands both height and depth: the Midheaven’s shine, the IC’s ground, and the sixth house’s quiet craft. Using vivid fairy-tale images, we explore the earth-house triad—second, sixth, and tenth—and what happens when desire for “more” outruns our sense of enough. From...

What if your calling isn’t one narrow lane but an oak with many strong branches? We open the year by climbing from the ninth house of vision to the tenth house of visibility, where ideals must learn to walk, speak, and serve a real-world “whole.” The Midheaven becomes our threshold: a place to meet power, define vocation, and decide how to be seen without cutting off the roots that feed us. We gro...

A winter wish, a juniper tree, and a song that won’t be silenced. We read and unpack The Juniper Tree through the lens of myth and astrology, following a stark arc from dismemberment to remembrance, from underworld descent to the ninth house return of voice. The tale’s violent turn isn’t spectacle—it’s symbolic. A sister gathers bones and lays them at the roots; a bird rises from fire, sings what...