April was a month of two threads. One winds down into chthonic territory; the other reaches outward through the planetary spheres — and somewhere between the two, the reader who works with both ends up looking at the same things from different angles. Six titles went out. Here’s how they fit together.
A Queen Beneath the World — Persephone the Dark Queen
We’ve talked before about how often Persephone is reduced to a footnote in someone else’s myth — Demeter’s grieving daughter, Hades’ abducted bride. Persephone the Dark Queen puts her where the older sources already had her: at the centre, ruling the underworld in her own right, presiding over the rites that promised initiates a different relationship with death.
The book follows her across her doubled life — the surface and the depth, the maiden and the sovereign — and pays particular attention to the cult that grew around her at Eleusis and beyond. For readers already familiar with our earlier titles on the chthonic feminine,* this one extends the line another step.
Reading the Sky — The Birth Chart
Astrology has no shortage of beginner books, and most of them race to interpretation before the reader knows what they’re looking at. The Birth Chart takes the slower road. Houses, signs, planets, aspects — each element introduced in its own right, then placed back into the wheel where it belongs. The ambition isn’t to hand the reader a set of cookbook readings, but to teach them to see a chart as a structure.
It’s the foundation our four planetary volumes rest on. Read in sequence, the five books form a small course: the chart first, then the bodies that move across it.
read your birth chart with our calculator or unveil how read it
The Outer Planets, Plus One — Saturn, Uranus, Pluto, and Chiron
Here’s the cleverness of grouping these four together. Saturn Astrology sits at the edge of the visible — the last planet the naked eye can find, the great structurer, the teacher whose lessons arrive on schedule whether we’re ready or not. Uranus Astrology breaks that structure open: revolution, awakening, the lightning that doesn’t ask permission. Pluto Astrology descends below both, into the slow generational tides that reshape what a culture considers possible.
And between Saturn and Uranus — almost literally, in orbital terms — sits Chiron Astrology. The wounded healer, only catalogued in 1977** and still working its way into mainstream chart reading, occupies the threshold between what is known and bounded and what breaks through. Treating Chiron alongside the three transpersonal bodies makes the whole sequence cohere: the limit, the fissure in the limit, the depth beneath, and the bridge that ties them.
meet your planets here
How They Speak to Each Other
The two threads aren’t really separate. Persephone is a book about descent, about a sovereignty that only becomes real underground. Pluto Astrology is, in the natal chart, the same descent given a different vocabulary. We didn’t plan the month as a diptych, but it reads as one.
For readers building a working library, the natural sequence is The Birth Chart first, then the four planetary volumes in whatever order interests you most — Saturn rewards patient readers, Uranus rewards restless ones, Pluto rewards those willing to sit with what they find, Chiron rewards everyone eventually. Persephone belongs on a different shelf but informs all of them.
What’s Next
May brings further additions to the planetary series, and we’ll have more to say in the coming weeks. Subscribers to the newsletter will hear first. In the meantime, all six April titles are available on the Templum Diane site.
Which of the four planets are you starting with? We have opinions, but we’d rather hear yours.
* See our earlier volumes on Hekate and on the Eleusinian mysteries — the same territory approached from different angles.
** By Charles Kowal, who initially wasn’t sure whether he was looking at a comet or a small planet. The astrological tradition has been working out a similar question ever since.