Invocation to the Egyptian Sun God, RA: Hail, thou Disk, thou lord of rays who risest on the horizon day by day"Homage to thee"who art the self-created; when thou risest on the horizon and sheddest thy beams of light upon the land of the North and of the South thou art beautiful, yea beautiful, and all the gods rejoice when they behold thee, the King of Heaven.1
Where the sign of Cancer exemplifies the feminine powers of
the Moon and the Night, Leo shines out with the power of the Sun and masculine
solar consciousness. The Sun symbolizes
not only Spirit, but our individuality.
When a culture is based primarily on masculine solar principles and
denigrates and rejects the mysterious lunar powers of the unconscious realms,
Sun-consciousness turns deadly, scorching the Earth and drying up all the
moisture of life. This one-sided
reliance on solar consciousness and rugged individualism has left us in the
Wasteland.
Yet when we bring both our solar and lunar natures into balance, our daylight consciousness gets renewed and revived. This Leo New Moon brings the Sun and Moon together to start a new cycle of self-awareness based on the sacred marriage of masculine and feminine consciousness. Out of this new marriage, new life and creativity is born.
Leo: The Sun. Light. Lion and Lioness. King and Queen. Splendour. Majesty. Glory. Consciousness. Strength. Pride. Power. Self-confidence.
These symbols and virtues exemplify the energies of the sign of Leo; strong energies that shape the way we live our lives. As with all energy, how we use it is up to us. Do you use your self-confidence with grace and kindness or do you use it to dominate others? Do you cultivate a balanced expression of your strength, pride and power or do you need to be the center of attention? Do you light up a room when you walk in or do you hide your light under a bushel? Each sign has power to shape our destiny, but Leo, as the sign of the first harvest, shows the world who we are and what we've cultivated.
Like the Lion and Lioness who exemplify these virtues, we all
need their courage and pride to become "the best that we can be'. The great Leo initiation involves taming the
strong emotional reactions of our nature through skill and self-mastery,
willpower and courage. Too often in the
past, men have done this by killing the lion within and then wearing the dead
lion-skin to prove their worth. (Perhaps
that's why they need Viagra -- they've killed their passion.) A better way lies in the Strength Tarot Card,
where the Lady firmly controls the lion without killing it. Leo asks us to channel our passions and
control our energies, not kill it and then live a half-life of looking to the
outer world for confirmation of who we are.
Leo powers our creativity, so whatever way we incarnate our Leo nature, you can bet it will be big, dramatic and demanding, fun, playful and creative. This is the fire power of a bonfire, a sustained burn that keeps us fascinated all night. When I was young, we had bonfires on the beach, with the stars overhead and the ocean pulsing on the shore. We gathered round the fires just as people have gathered through the centuries around fires to celebrate life, as well as for warmth and security it provides to keep out the dark of the night.
The Light in the Dark. A good image for our Leo energy. Here is the Light that was born at the darkest hour at Winter Solstice, grown to its fullest potential. Leo's ruling "planet' is the Sun, our very own light in the vast darkness of the Universe. Leo's light within us is also the light of our individual spark of Divinity. Ruling the 3rd chakra -- our solar plexus -- our individual Sun and our Leo self-awareness can either cater to our ego desires (shaped by patriarchy's twisted sense of things) or it can dive into the darkness of our inner psyche and take the path of Individuation to true originality. All it takes is Heart -- another symbol for the Leo experience.
Our creative impulse comes from being in touch with our Self, this inner spark of divinity. So every summer as the Sun journeys through Leo, we get to see the first fruits what we've created for the year. What have you created? Are you happy with it or does it need refining? Leo's journey asks us to express our deepest essence, to be generous with our vitality and warmth, and to exalt in the blessing of being alive!
Just as the Sun's life-force blesses us with light and warmth and growth, Leo blesses us with our unique vision of ourselves. At this New Moon, plant the seed of your own glorious fire of creativity and vision. What were you born to Be? What talents are you here to contribute to the world? We need everyone's input if we're going to make a conscious leap in evolution and shift out of patriarchy into partnership, with each other and with the Earth.
The Leo New Moon
The Leo New Moon occurs on Friday, August 17th at 8:54am
PDT/ 11:54am EDT/ 3:54pm GMT.
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