Jemima Cainer, Daughter of Jonathon Cainer, Astrologer

My Astrologer Dad Visited Me After His Death

Jonathan Cainer was a famous British astrologer, if not the most famous and a long -term premie and major financial donor of Guru Maharaj Ji/Maharaji/Prem Rawat. He wrote astrological predictions six days a week for the Daily Mail, and forecasts for three Australian newspapers: the Sydney Daily Telegraph, the Melbourne Herald Sun, and the Perth Sunday Times. It was impossible to be involved in 1970s Divine Light Mission and not hear an awful lot about astrology. The followers of Guru Maharaj Ji, as Prem Rawat was then calling himself, were also involved in every possible superstition and were always anxious to talk about themselves and their "experience," mystical predictions based on their birthdate and their insights into themselves according to their signs. I hoped to leave that all behind when I left Divine Light Mission and so I'll ignore the more astrological parts of her story.

I've recently read "The Museum of Lost and Fragile Things: A Year of Salvage" by Suzanne Joinson and "A Wild Child's Escape" by Jane Whittingon. Both of these books critically record squalid and sordid family lives in Divine Light Misson in England in the 1970s as does Ms Cainer. The guru himself lived a far more sordid and secret life of drugs, luxury and lies but in public, he always taught that his followers should not take drugs, live orderly, somewhat regimented lives and be responsible, loving parents and that following his rules and practising the secret techniques of meditation his organisations taught would keep them on the straight and narrow through bliss, love and higher consciousness. These ideas were proven to be nonsense over time.

Cainer, himself, must be given some credit. Ater all, he was the father to three non-biological children and provided them with food and a home and had himself been left behind by his own mother when a boy.

Ms Cainer's story was published when she was due to take up the position of astrologer to the gutter press that her father had held. This is an edited version of her story.

She had a very troubled relationship with her father and the chaos of her youth. Her mother Melanie was killed in a car crash 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.'

There were 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 a 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.'

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.'

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. Brought 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.'

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.

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.

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.'