James Burgess was born in Bristol in 1951 and has been practising and teaching astrology since the late 1980s. He is the founder of the Sacred 7 Academy, an online school offering weekly Zoom-based courses integrating astrology, Sabian Symbols, the Elven Star, Sufism, and the 7 Words system. He is the creator of Sabian Alchemy, an original interpretive framework built on the 360 symbolic degree images developed by Marc Edmund Jones and interpreted by Dane Rudhyar, and has published an extensive body of original commentary on all 360 Sabian Symbols at jamesburgess.com. He is also the founder of the Unicorn Camps and retreat centres in Ireland and Lithuania. His philosophical foundation draws on Sufism and the idea that the 7 planes of existence, central to the Sufi tradition, correspond to stages of human development and self-mastery. He has contributed multiple articles to the spirituality platform Forever Conscious covering Sabian Symbols, Chiron, Saturn-Pluto, and the 7 Words system, and has lectured and facilitated workshops across Ireland and online. A forthcoming book on Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, co-authored with Julia Sophia, is due via Red Wheel/Weiser.