Astrologer Jonathan Cainer is conducting an experiment on today’s partial eclipse of the sun. If you want to take part, here are some details of his project:

“Is it time to make a clean break with a part of your past? Today’s solar eclipse is especially auspicious for all who have been thinking about doing things differently. Just make a small but sincere gesture of commitment to your new plan at some point during the next 24 hours. You may also find the eclipse is good for making wishes and healing wounds. I’m currently testing out various traditional beliefs about the way in which eclipses influence us… so if today’s events happen to leave you with an exceptional tale to tell, please drop me a line! (Email: feedbackforum@bubble.com)”

Image: Dean MacAdam.

The astrologer, Jonathan Cainer believes he may have hit on the way astrology works. He cites articles in the science magazines, New Scientist and ScienceNews.org:

Last April, the Genesis spacecraft began its journey home. It took a 3-million-mile detour, swinging past Earth to do a circuit around a distant point before flying back to Earth.

The spacecraft had hopped aboard the interplanetary superhighway, a network of tubes crisscrossing through the solar system. By jumping from one tube to another at the solar system’s version of highway interchanges, a spacecraft can travel vast distances using practically no fuel. Engineers are designing trajectories to send spacecraft coasting along these routes to make voyages that were previously unimaginable.

Edward Belbruno, a mathematician at Princeton University who masterminded the first spacecraft journey along low-fuel highways in 1991, says: “The old way is like using a 747 jet to blast through the sky. The new way is like using a glider plane, which rides the natural currents and eddies of the air.”

Cainer concludes: “Jupiter, apparently, is a ‘central station’ in this system. All this is fact, not fiction… and to me, it is a real revelation. Until now, sceptics have always insisted that no such connections exist… and that this was one reason why there could never be any logical basis for astrology!”

Who would have thought it? A Tube service in outer space. Very supernatural.

The scene of the greatest political sex-scandal of the 20th century has been twice exorcised to cleanse it of stigma, it has been revealed.

Cliveden was once the fashionable country house of Lady Astor who hosted political salons and long weekends for the rich and notorious. Now a hotel, it was brought back into the news last week by the death of John Profumo, once Minister of war in the Macmillan Government.

Profumo, disgraced himself by having an affair with a call girl, Christine Keeler, at Cliveden, and brought down the Government.

The house was exorcised by Dom Robert Pettipierre, a Benedictine monk who specialized in the rites. After one of the rituals he commented: “There were a lot of accumulations from the past, much of them quite sticky.”

The monk, who used the traditional holy water and salt in the rituals, penned an account of one of them in a book: Exorcising Devils.

He wrote: “I had to exorcise a house in Buckinghamshire. The owner had died and his widow asked me to ‘clean up’ the house before she vacated it. I blessed the interior.”

Singer Michael Jackson is now reported to want to buy the property. How long before it needs to be exorcised again?

A psychology professor is claiming that many transplant patients “inherit” personality traits from tissue donors. Gary Schwartz of the University of Arizona, says that he has detailed evidence from 70 cases where this is said to have occurred.

His claim is that in more than ten percent of major transplant cases involving the heart, lung, kidney or liver, the patient will show marked signs of this phenomenon. Patients may adopt the donor’s taste in food, develop the same talents, and even take up identical pastimes and interests.

In one case a seven-year-old girl had dreams about being killed after receiving the heart of a girl who had been murdered.

In another, a calm, health-conscious woman began craving fast food and became aggressive, mimicking the tastes of a biker whose heart she had been given.

The many instances of this syndrome seem to reflect the notion that body tissue retains its own memories of events in the life of a person, especially the major organs.

Ancient beliefs hold that eating the organs of a dead warrior will confer the same qualities on the recipient. Once again, folk tales are shown to have a basis in reality, it seems.