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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