Jemima Cainer was always determined never to follow her late legendary father, Jonathan Cainer, into astrology.
And the more he begged her to study the stars like him, the more she pushed back.
‘I hated it. Loathed it,’ she says. ‘I was the biggest sceptic to the point of declaring myself a non-believer, and calling it all a load of rubbish!’
Instead, she took a law degree, worked with vulnerable children, had three wonderful sons and, well, did everything she could to block out any sign that she might have inherited a bit of the family magic.
Even after her father died suddenly, in 2016, of a catastrophic heart attack, she didn’t waver.
But as the years passed, the pull became stronger and the spiritual experiences more powerful.
‘I felt like I was going mad – that something was wrong with me,’ she says.
Then her dead father appeared in a vision – which we’ll come back to later – and, finally, she gave in and enrolled at The Faculty of Astrological Studies in central London, the very place her father had studied.
Late Daily Mail astrologer Jonathan Cainer with children Jemima, Izaak and Sofi
‘If he could see me now, he’d laugh so much. He’d say: ‘I told you so.’
Particularly because, from January 1, Jemima will be taking over the family business, replacing her cousin Oscar (who has been holding the fort since Jonathan died), writing horoscopes for Daily Mail readers, recording messages and helping us all navigate the texture of life with a little bit of help from the sun signs.
It is something that has helped her make sense of her very troubled relationship with her father and the chaos of her youth.
Because nothing was normal about Jemima’s childhood.
Not the car crash that killed her mother Melanie when Jemima was just two years old – ‘I was in the car – I still have memories from it and PTSD – I stopped talking for a while afterwards.’
Or the fact that her father had a vision of Melanie at home while she was dying in hospital, and was oddly matter of fact about it at the time, saying: ‘Oh yeah, I was serving tea to the kids and suddenly – sound and vision in the corner of the room. It was Mel in a strange blue light, looking serene. She said: ‘”on I think I’m going…” I said: “No you’re not, I need you here.” She said: “No, no I think I am…”.’
Nor the endless women who came and stayed – often with their children in tow – ‘we might wake up with some other kids in our bedrooms’ – over the years in their rambling old manor house. It takes Jemima a good five minutes – and a diagram – to explain to me who all ‘ten or so’ of her full and half-siblings are and who all their mothers and fathers were.
‘There was lots of communal living and swapping around,’ she says.
Thanks to her father, nothing about Jemima Cainer’s upbringing was normal
Which was largely thanks to the influence of the Divine Light Mission (DLM) – a controversial cult led by self-styled ‘peace educator’ Prem Rewat that began in 1960s India – of which Jonathan was devoted member from the age of 15.
‘We all grew up in the cult,’ says Jemima. ‘It was all pretty dodgy, so astrology was always one of the straighter things of my childhood.’
As most people will recall, Jonathan Cainer was one of the most famous and well-paid astrologers on the planet, regularly earning millions a year.
He was a brilliant, talented, mercurial astrologer who loved women – a lot of them – attention, excitement and chaos.
‘He was addicted to drama! He could get addicted to anything – one week he’d be addicted to doing the washing. Next, he’d be up making pizzas – all night, all day,’ says Jemima.
When she was little, he’d smoke three cigarettes at once – ‘one in his mouth, one burning in the ashtray and one behind his ear, for afterwards,’ she says. ‘And in later life, it was cocaine and Class A stimulants. So it was intense – really intense – growing up.’
He also had an unusual style of parenting.
‘He hated anything straight or normal and prided himself on being alternative,’ says Jemima. ‘So I was heavily encouraged not to go to school and studying wasn’t encouraged – growing up, he’d tell me not to be so boring.’
With so many children – and women – all clamouring for attention, he spread himself very thin.
‘He needed more attention than any of us. He was very performative and dramatic. But he could be a totally brilliant parent – when he shone his light on you, you’d be the centre of his world for two minutes, and then he’d get a phone call and be gone for a week,’ she says.
They all adored him and battled for his attention.
‘I loved him so much and I miss him terribly, but he was a damaged, flawed, complex person.’
Jonathan’s early life had been almost as chaotic as that of his children. He was born – a Sagittarius – in Surbiton, Surrey, with six brothers and sisters and a home life lacking in harmony or parental fidelity.
Then one day his mother, a spiritual healer, upped and left, leaving a note that Jonathan found when he got home from school: ‘Dear Jonathan, have gone away with the twins. Won’t be back. Will be in touch. Best wishes, Mum.’ A day later, his father moved his girlfriend in – with their new-born baby.
Young Jonathan was clearly clever, but left school at 15 with no qualifications, joined the Divine Light Mission (where he first met Melanie), became a petrol pump attendant, joined a band called Strange Cloud and moved to America in the early 1980s to manage a nightclub in Los Angeles.
It was there that he met a psychic poet called Charles John Quatro, who told him he would, one day, write an astrology column read by millions. So, returning to Britain, Cainer enrolled at the Faculty of Astrological Studies and, well, the rest is history.
He and Melanie had been friends for years, but hadn’t been together as a couple for long when she died, leaving Jonathan to bring up three children from her previous relationship, Jemima, aged two, seven-month old twins and one of his children from a previous relationship.
In the wake of Melanie’s death, he talked to her constantly and tempted her to haunt him by preserving her bedroom studio exactly as it was.
‘He kept everything – all her belongings untouched and no one was allowed to go in. He was definitely in touch with the afterlife and I don’t think he dealt with it in a healthy way at all,’ says Jemima. ‘He chatted to her a lot.’
Jonathan Cainer was one of the most famous and well-paid astrologers on the planet
But for all his devastation, Jonathan was not a man designed for the single life, so within weeks, he’d started an affair with the children’s nanny, Sue, who moved into the family home near York and into his bed. Others followed.
‘He also had no boundaries and no concept of time, deadlines, order,’ says Jemima.
The one thing not lacking was money – thanks to income from the phone lines for his horoscopes.
‘He was earning so much,’ she says. ‘Millions and millions.’
Which went out as fast as it came in. Some on mad, impulsive schemes – he bought loads of properties with 100 per cent mortgages that backfired when interest rates went up. One house he wanted so badly that he paid extra to keep all the furniture and the owners to be out in a week.
In 2004, he launched the Museum of Psychic Experience in York with his great spoon-bending pal Uri Geller, which was not a success. And three years later turned the building into a haunted house attraction, which closed in 2014.
‘There was always something,’ says Jemima. ‘At once stage he liked to tell people how he’d set up a drying out clinic for drug addicts – that was in our house!’
But she says that most of the money sloshed out in those massive donations to the Divine Light Mission – which was ironic because the DLM supposedly regarded all materialism as ‘evil’.
‘The head of the cult had a gold plated toilet, for goodness’ sake – paid for by my dad,’ she says. ‘Dad had a huge saviourship complex,’ she says.
Of course, growing up amid all this chaos and drama would have an impact on any child. The house became a party zone – constantly overflowing with people and things, because Jonathan was quite a hoarder.
So it’s perhaps not surprising that Jemima gave up on school after just one GCSE, embraced partying and bad boys until, when she was 20, she fell pregnant, had her first son and everything changed.
‘I knew I had to break free from Dad and create a stable world for my son,’ she says.
So she started again. Took her A levels via an access course, then a law degree, which she passed. Bought up her son on her own.
Suddenly all she craved was calm. Order and predictability and a tidy life. Today she has three sons and a lovely, long term partner.
‘I am a Virgo,’ she says. ‘I love a clean surface and a herbal tea and gardening and knitting! Life is never going to be as orderly as I like.’
Then, in 2015, Jonathan was warned by doctors that he was very unwell with heart disease. And a year later, after putting his affairs in order, died of a massive heart attack after taking some cocaine.
‘He knew what he was doing. He took enough coke to kill himself. He just wanted to go out on his own terms,’ says Jemima.
Sadly, when he died, there was even more chaos.
‘All the money was gone – he was insolvent,’ says Jemima. ‘Everyone was surprised except us – we’d seen how he spent it.’
So that was the end of Jemima’s law career – he’d been paying half her rent because she couldn’t afford it on her own with two tiny babies. So she moved further north, where everything was cheaper, and started working in educations with vulnerable children, which she loved.
And that was when astrology started bobbing up.
Before Jonathan died, he had lined up his nephew Oscar to take over the family business, but it was his voice that had remained on the phone lines ever since.
Which was one of the things that finally convinced Jemima to get involved.
‘I had a psychic experience when my dad told me he felt like part of his soul was trapped in the phonelines and I needed to let him go so he could move on to the right place…’
Once she’d made the decision, she embraced astrology with gusto. Using it first to address her own demons, more recently she has been giving readings at festivals and on her own YouTube channel.
‘Today people are more interested in understanding themselves at a deeper level and I think astrology is a brilliant tool to do that.’
Jemima’s style is completely different to Jonathan. She is warm, approachable, open, extraordinarily likeable and – if the eerily accurate 15-minute reading she did for me based on my birth chart is anything to go by – she really, really knows her stuff. (She was bang on about everything, from my love of a plan to a loathing of fakery).
But she is also very conscious of the responsibility.
‘A massive part of astrology is ethics and challenging your own bias – you have to come at it from a place where you’re doing something helpful,’ she says.
It has taken a lot of therapy and even more astrology for Jemima to feel at peace with her late father.
‘It helped me find more acceptance of him and all his complexities. Because he was brilliant and difficult and drove me mad and I loved him so much.’
After he died, she spread some of his ashes at the Glastonbury Festival in Somerset. ‘I went on a little pilgrimage there because it was his one of his very few happy places.’
And finally, what would she say to anyone who says… Ah yes, another Cainer. What a coincidence they’ve all got the gift – isn’t it all a load of mumbo jumbo?
Does that bother her?
‘Of course not! I used to think that too. My dad was really defensive about astrology, but I spent years of my life as a cynic, so I understand. It’s good to question things. But now I’ve gone full circle and I’m ready to take on the mantle.’
- Jemima Cainer’s brilliant new astrology column will begin on New Year’s Day
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