“Revelation of worth” is the message of Leo 26°, After The Heavy Storm, A Rainbow. It is ruled by Taurus, in a twelve-fold sequence, and that sign is indeed synonymous with value and worth. The rainbow, of course, is a symbol of promise and in the biblical sense it is emblematic of a new covenant. We have made it through the desert, weathering any dearth by virtue of our self-reliance, and now we are deemed valuable and worthy of investment, on the level of spritual union (with the divine aspect of ourself or god). We have come face to with our divine archetype and we must keep this link unbroken. The Rainbow is a symbol, too, of divine communication, our colorful pathway to our divine selves and messaging. We must keep the channels open between the sky and earth elements of ourselves, embracing the totality of ourselves, the full range of our true colors. This is an image of self-acceptance as the precursor of the promise of success—guess what, folks, you can’t have one without the other.

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A Large Camel Is Seen Crossing A Vast And Forbidding Desert is the image at Leo 25°. It is a symbol of self-sufficiency so its rule by Aries makes sense on that singular score. What is ahead is a long and exhausting adventure (sound familiar) and the camel symbolizes our ability to sustain ourselves independently, with no outside resource. In a sense it was easy for the spiritual ascetic of the previous image to give himself over to god, relying on the kindness of strangers; and just as Aries is a counterpoint to Pisces, we see here that self-reliance is the order of the day. The path we are on is always also something of an occult path. We must be emotionally self-contained, absorbing all that we have learned from life thus far, and be willing to face the nothingness (desert) that is ahead of us all. Aries-ruled symbols always carry a new lease on life and so let us now imagine that we are given such license.

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The paradox of Pisces and its spiritual bent is evident in the symbol for Leo 24° Totally Concentrated On Inner Spiritual Attainment, A Man is Sitting In A State Of Complete Neglect Of Bodily Appearance And Cleanliness. It’s an extreme image that shows the expense at which spiritual focus might be given. Forget the notion of cleanliness being next to godliness, here we see that it requires total neglect of anything but it. We immediately see the yogi in our mind eye. He has renounced all and takes no care of his appearance, scarcely eating the food that is brought him, if at all. The metaphoric truth is that spirituality cannot be had in half measures. You must give yourself over to it, completely.

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I’ve been away a few days and my plate is full to heaping so I’m going to make myself easy and not over-think these next few Sabian symbols. At Leo 23° : In A Circus The Bareback Rider Displays Her Dangerous Skill, the keynotes are audacity, perseverance and virtuosity. Mythologically the horse symbolizes raw power, particularly of a libidinous nature. In taming so wild an energy one is endowed with great abilities. When a healthy ego can take control, harnessing this raw power, transcendence is ironically fueled by the most basic drives of our beastly nature. We can sacrifice our baser desires and put them into service of our soaring goals. As a result the mind is open to a more evolved consciousness where the seemingly improbable becomes dramatically possible. This symbol is ruled by Aquarius in a twelve-fold sequence which always has something to do with the extraordinary.

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After yesterdays stewed chickens, today we find another bird, A Carrirer Pigeon Fulfilling Its Mission. If we extend the metaphor of the flailing chickens being prematurely trying to fly with spiritual knowledge, drunk on the knowledge, but unable to put it into practice, today at 22° Leo, we see the pigeon effectively taking flight because it carries a specific (spiritual) message. What this says is that a specific message we have to deliver can wing us into spiritual action, and that our nature in this regard is essentially one of service. Specificity in focus gives us the proper lift off.

Capricorn rules this oracle in a twelve-fold sequence. The sign, ruled by Saturn, stands in counterport to yesterday’s Jupiter/Sagittarian ruled image of unbridled, chaotic expansion. Via Saturn’s energy of certain containment we can hone all our flailing expansiveness into a set flight path, which is nonetheless determined by natural instincts; like utilizing the natural homing inclination of a pigeon for our own purposes: spirituality can take hold via the human messenger which is only that. We are not the object but rather the subject, that which gives flight to immutable spiritual concepts that will proliferated through us. The chicken and the pigeon are both domesticated, but while the chicken is penned, in shackles and flightless, the pigeon retains its basic freedom and is nonetheless a more faithful servant. Faith indeed is the energy of the sign of Capricorn, cardinal-earth, symbolized by a mountain, something we climb, in faith and endurance, to find certain communion with the divine or, most fittingly, to receive divine messaging. One can draw a parallel from Moses on Sinai to Jesus on the mount to the carrier pigeon in this image, carrying some form or another of important, if not good, news.

Being suffused with special purpose is the ticket to ride, as is the message itself. Our individual ideas only have resonance in so far as they connect with a collective. If we are simply lost in the revelation, we are like those chickens. But if we are in service to the message, bent upon delivering it to others, we have gods speed.

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Not even slightly questioning this miraculous twelve-fold sequence, randomly divined symbols falling into perfect astrological order. Today is about expansion of consciousness and, of course, it is ruled by Sagittarius which is all about just that. You can’t make this shit up: Intoxicated Chickens Dizzily Flap Their Wings Trying To Fly is the Sabian oracle at 21° Leo and it, more accurately, depicts a premature attempt at mind expansion. Dionysus is the predominant archetype of the sign of Sagittarius—the thigh-born of Zeus, the sign ruling that particular body part while Jupiter (Zeus) is the governing planet, the energy of which is expansion. Unlike any of Zeus/Jupiter’s other Olympian sons—Ares/Mars, Hermes/Mercury, Apollo, Hephaetus/Vulcan—Dionysus is his true inheritor; this god of the vine is also the precursor of Christ, these “facts” not being mutually exclusive.

So we have the intoxication factor here as providing, perhaps the courage or lack of inhibition toward mind expansion. But like any drug, wine might only point the way to their being other states of perception available to us, while the altered variety which are had through the ingesting or imbibing of any agent aren’t sustainable. Likewise we can become drunk on new spiritual knowledge, the effects of which might wear off just like any buzz. Often, the result is more confusion rather than clarity because what is being stimulated, really, is the ego which doesn’t have the capacity for flight; in fact it is what keeps us earthbound and terrestrial, rather than soaringly spiritual. Heightened feelings are in the realm of the physical senses, and they are mere imitation of sublime ecstasy.

Why chickens? Well the interpretations I’ve stumbled upon all chalk up to these birds being standard issue. These birds are not rare ones. They symbolize our typical natures which are flightless and rather mortal fodder. They do flail around, as we do, for the most part in life, rarely taking to the wing on something that might sustain our flights of true freedom. They are reactionary. And what reacts in us is our ego, hurling us this way and that, and it cannot be transcended in half measures, it must be an all or nothing affair.

I think I intimated several months back that I suffered some ill treatment at the hands of a couple of friends who, despite their swinging on vines from this psychic chiropractor to that energy worker to some guru or another, are pretty wrapped up in their material fame and fortune—basically they’re total snobs who play eighth-grade games of trying to make others feel less-than or excluded. Anyway, I let them have it. I was “right” and it “felt great” to sweep my side of the street clean of all their debris; but really, in the end I would have soared more readily skyward had I just kept my own confidence, knowing what I knew, and took the fifth. It did my spirituality no good to speak my mind, really. If anything it set me back.

The true embodiment of the sign of Sagittarius is the seeker, the sign’s motto being “I see”, but the search is never truly outward. We might be guided by so-called gurus but even they should be guiding us inward as they do likewise. Expansion of consciousness is a quiet, meditative, private, unseen endeavor. If there is the slightest cackling or arm-waving about it than we are on the wrong path entirely. I like the way this image goes right for the shadow jugular of the Sagittarian experience. True spirituality cannot be telegraphed and it is only the outcroppings of, say, organized religion that we can become inordinately drunk upon. Revellers who followed Dionysus might have had a proclivity to be overserved, but the god himself never touched the stuff.

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The astrological shift from Libra to Scorpio is always that of light to darkness, surface experience to what lies beneath, high consciousness to deepest subconscious, ordered civilization to the wormy world beneath it. And so I continue to get validation for my simple overlay of the twelve signs, in turn, presiding over each of the 360 degrees of the Zodiac: as today’s symbol, Scorpio-ruled in my estimation, is about root energy. For all our high ideals and would-be elevation of consciousness, our emphasis on all goodness and Light tends to cast a very dark shadow. Zuni Indians Perform A Ritual To The Sun is the mage at Leo 20°. Of course this Pueblo culture was completely wiped out by the Apollonian ideal of civilization, its people becoming shadow entities living on the streets and fringes of what progress hath wrought. In convenient memory they stand as a symbol of a people who lived in perfect, peaceful harmony with Nature. Hindsight can be so patronizing. But who has the last laugh?

Everything returns to Nature. All living creatures and, in Time, all civilzations. That wormy underworld—Scorpio ruled by Pluto, the god thereof—will win out. Meanwhile, even in our civilized vision, we romanticize that which we had a hand in destroying. Isn’t that just like us. We will represent, typically in strip-mall fashion the spirit of humankind that lived so in concert with Nature as to be like subjects of the animal kingdom which we daily extinguish via our civilized actions, not realizing that our own path leads toward the same destruction, creation, destruction, creation…

Yesterday, we hopped on a Houseboat to escape the rigidity of restraining social structures; today we actually reverse the dynamic and revert to natural world. The sign of Leo, as it is, is one that finds artifice fatuous. In our book Sextrology, we call the Leo Man “The Natural” as he, for one, tends to espouse native cultures and rhythms—this is akin to there being so many drummers of the sign as well. The sign rules the heart and thus the beat of life. Artificial socieites can take us away from all that, or seem to. But at the heart of all existence is the beat of life which is never very far away. It’s simply below the surface. The Sun in the symbol is the heart of our solar system and that which rhythmically aligns us. Of course, it is Leo’s ruling planet.

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At 19° Leo, we find temporary freedom from strictly structure social behavior in the form of A Houseboat Party. In a twelve-fold sequence, this image is ruled by Libra, a sign of democracy, the Scales being the great leveler. And indeed, unlike the lawn party a week ago, a symbol of certain privilge afforded a ruling class, today we witness a more bohemian gathering, not on a fixed lawn but on a traveling landscape of a river, forward moving, connoting progress. Whereas the lawn party would have been assembled with an exclusive guest list, the houseboat party is likely open to whomever might hear of it. Still, we are floating on the surface and it is a party, where the emphasis is on upliftment, again a Libran experience, focus being on goodness and light.

Somewhere in the Multiverse, This is Where I Live

The sign of Libra is concerned with surface experience, that of an ever elevating consciousness—the sign inspires enlightenment via conscious means of intellect and reason. The Age of Enlightenment itself, with its emphasis on reason, coincided with a neo-classical vision of the world, and the exploration of democratic principles first introduced in Athens, where Apollonian ideals reigned supreme. The Enlightenment was, largely, a democratic phenomenon which swept away the last vestiges of feudal society, power shifting from the few to the many, with the seat of power being in the individual mind. Likewise, this inclusive Houseboat Party sweeps away the rigidity of exculsive Lawn Party. We are making a break with, escaping from, the rigidities of social structure and routine activities of our workaday lives. We are happily amongst the hoi polloi, feeling the free-flowing energies underfoot, while keeping Libran balance, perhaps leaning here and there upon one another.

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Today’s image is ruled by Virgo in a twelve-fold sequence and the keyword, fittingly, is alchemy. Virgo is the mutable-earth sign and ruled by Mercury (Greek: Hermes) named for the god of alchemists and the hermetic traditions. A Chemist Conducts An Experiment For His Students is the Sabian symbol du jour.

The processes of nature may be hidden from us, but they await our discovery. We don’t just raise our voice in rejoiceful praise of the world’s workings, we seek to find out what makes nature tick. We employ intellectual analysis—very Virgo—which is our ability to control or alter natural processes, turning lead into gold in every real and metaphorical sense. We draw on that community (choir) of yesterday and build upon the knowledge they accumulated, becoming one in a long line of like-minds. We become a vehicle of rht collective, seeking to transform nature, bending it to our will.

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Today’s oracle is a double Leo one, that sign ruling this symbol in a twelve-fold sequence: A Volunteer Church Choir Singing Religious Hymns is the picture for today. Yesterday we made it through the storm (of the release of our own emotions) and now we enjoy a feeling, or a longing, for togetherness, something that might unite us in our dedication to a collective ideal. As in a flood myth, when we finally land, what do we do, but make a some kind of dedication, a loyal Leo word if there ever was one. We want to institute the transcendence we’ve achieved, individually, into a community experience. This is the basis of any religion really—as individuals, Christ or Buddha achieved something quite extraordinary, surpassing and sublime as -ians or -ists we can only emulate them, certain sainthood being the most we can hope to achieve.

The Wooster Group

Such is the symbol 17° Leo. But we can find resonance closer to home perhaps. As mentioned, flood myths are always about recovery. Let us use the example of someone recovering from an addiction—Noah was a drunk, lest we forget. This personal form of recovery (Cancer) from a personal fall (Gemini) is something that is emotional and can only happen, individually. And yet, the sustenance of individual recovery might rely upon forming some kind of fellowship, whether it be AA or some other form. Never mind that the twelve steps in “the program” seem to follow a certain logic we find encoded in the twelve signs and houses of the Zodiacal system. But that’s another topic altogether. The point is that togetherness, an attribute of the Leo fifth house, is what sustains us, with substance and security, against the dangers of the world from whence we have been delivered and from which we seek continued protection.

The castle and the keep of Leo, under the protection of some Sun King or big old Queen, to which we devote our loyalty, is the metaphoric landscape of the Leoan experience. Individuals form themselves into a “common mold” via which we become solidified in our shared beliefs and values. The shadow side to this begins when we view the stormy Nature that delivered us as the culprit itself against which we must gird ourselves. This dark side of Leo seeks to subdue and dominate Nature which it views as violent and undermining, a perspective that might ultimately lead to a desire to subdue it if not frack the hell out of the planet. The religion that is borne out of the collective becomes the all-protector that casts a suspicious eye on the natural world. While on the Sun-y side of Leo we see the human collective and nature working in perfect concert, a tribal Utopia that might only purely exist in an instant, for a season, or a few years before corruption inches in. Yesterday, nature rejoiced. Today we collectively raise our voices to do likewise. And so long as we lend our voices to that nature, all will remain perfectly in concert and in that instant we find something inalterably eternal, like King Arthur’s Camelot which doesn’t last long in the legend and yet the ideal of it seems to be as timeless as infinity itself.

We are not just together, finding community in this image, we are together in our need, love and dedication to an ideal. But we must remember that we glimpsed that ideal in very real Nature, it only points to our human failing if we aren’t able to achieve, or rather align with, it.

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