About me

Journalist and sidereal astrologer.

María Alejandra smiling in front of a zodiac wheel

How it began

Hi, I'm María Alejandra

I was a child the first time someone handed me a piece of paper with my name on it and a circle full of lines that meant nothing to me yet. Nubia Montañez had made it, a Colombian astrologer whose readings were astonishingly precise. I didn't understand a single symbol on that paper. But I understood every word she said about who I was.

Journalist and astrologer: I didn't know it yet, that day, sitting across from Nubia, but both would end up being my craft and my calling.

Diploma in Sidereal Astrology from The Builders of the Adytum, Bogotá 2013 — Diploma in Sidereal Astrology · The Builders of the Adytum · Bogotá, 2013

My calling

Astrologer

What I did know, even then, was that dreams, spirituality, and the mystery of life and death pulled at me. Over the years I realized that curiosity wasn't a phase. It was something bigger, still waiting for a name. And the name was astrology.

I wasn't interested in learning it halfheartedly. The internet is full of shallow astrology, and to me this knowledge felt too deep, too serious, to take lightly. I wanted tradition. I wanted rigor. I found both at The Builders of the Adytum (B.O.T.A.), the Mystery School of the Western Tradition, in Los Angeles. There, in 2011, I began studying sidereal astrology, tarot, and kabbalah. I've since interpreted hundreds of birth charts.

Why sidereal

Why sidereal astrology?

It's the question I get asked most. And answering it means admitting something: when I started studying astrology, I didn't know there were two kinds either.

I found out almost by accident, my journalist's instincts still switched on: in this trade, you check before you publish. So one day I did exactly that. I looked up my birth chart online, then used an astronomy app to check it against the real sky on the night I was born.

They didn't match. Not even close.

That's when I learned that most of the astrology out there (horoscopes, apps, the internet) is tropical. It runs on coordinates fixed more than three thousand years ago and never updated since. An inherited map, frozen in time.

Sidereal astrology is the other kind, the one that actually matches what's happening up there, right now, in the real sky. And without knowing it yet, that was the very astrology Nubia had used, all those years before, to read my chart so accurately.

That discovery gave me the principle that still defines my work today: before I interpret a chart, I look at the real, verifiable sky, not an inherited one.

María Alejandra reading the cards for two clients, all three smiling

María Alejandra with two clients at the magazine's stand

What I do now

Readings

Astrology can point to what's coming, and yes, I look at that too. But my purpose goes further, understanding why we are the way we are, why life hands us certain challenges, and what we came here to do.

That's what I do in my personalized readings, in my videos, and in my articles for Libelle and Margriet in the Netherlands, and for Cromos magazine in Colombia.

It's funny: I'm still doing the same thing I've always done, just backwards. In journalism, I listen first and tell the story after. In astrology it's the reverse: I meet the person through their chart first, before we've exchanged a single word, and only later do I hear them describe how they've actually lived out what I'd already seen there.

After fifteen years, what still moves me hasn't changed: seeing someone's face not just when they recognize themselves in what I interpret, but when they understand why. That's how I know, without a doubt, knowing your chart is one of the best gifts you can give yourself.

Astrologer for the magazines

Empathy

The word that comes up most in what my clients write. And if I've learned one thing in fifteen years, it's this: a birth chart isn't something you read, it's something you walk through with someone.

See the readings