Tornado Hits London

At first I thought it was my favourite Guru, Blowing Her Miscreant Wind; but no, it really was a freak tornado that tore up a London street today, leaving devastation in its wake, and luckily no serious injury. You know what us Brits are like, we just don’t do tornados. Especially not in middle of London, in the middle of December; so what’s that all about?

Listening to the news reports my astrologer brain automatically highlighted keywords that I could identify with planets and signs: the devastation – there’s a Pluto word if ever I heard one. Sudden, freak, unexpected, shock – they’re all Uranus words. Structures and buildings; there's Saturn. I reached straight for the astrology charts, and looked at what was happening in the UK chart (1st January, 1801 - using a midday chart as exact ‘birth’ time is not known), at the time of the tornado (11am)

The UK midday chart has an Aries ascendant, which makes Mars the chart ruler. Mars has just moved into Sagittarius, right next to expansive Jupiter, making a square aspect (dynamic or challenging) to Pluto in the UK chart. The UK also has Uranus at 2 degrees of Libra, which links up with Mars and Jupiter exactly.

Meanwhile Venus and Pluto are currently meeting in the skies, also in Sagittarius. Venus and Pluto link exactly to the Aries ascendant, and all together link to form a triangle aspect to newly retrograde Saturn in Leo. The UK is experiencing a Saturn return at the moment, so UK Saturn and current Saturn sit together here.

This triangle aspect of planets is a Grand Trine, a pattern of easy, flowing energy. Some people often make the mistake of assuming the ‘easy’ aspects bring only ‘good’ events, and the more challenging aspects like squares or oppositions forecast difficulties. But the ease refers to the ease of energy flow, which clearly in this case was effortless due to the sheer power of the storm.

The planet keywords were also visible in the coincidence that the street hit was the home of a well known female tv news reporter (Venus in Sagittarius meeting Pluto). As luck would have it (Jupiter), she'd taken the day off work, and so was well placed (in the local hairdressers!) to be at the centre of the action (mars), and straight back to work on tv (Saturn retro in Leo).

The last tornado to hit a highly populated area of Britain was last year (29 July), in Birmingham. Weirdly, Mars had just gone into the sign of Taurus that time, and was squaring Saturn (then just fresh into Leo), as well as Jupiter in the UK chart.

Read more about the London tornado here