The Moon is in Pisces today, eclipsing Neptune. Meanwhile Jupiter prepares to enter the sign of Leo after a year in Cancer.

CNN Headline: Children’s theme park employees caught in sex strings…

The themes of children, laughter, joy, excess, pregnancy, gambling, self expression, celebrities, fame, the ego, the sun, patriarchy, fathers, and love affairs will likely be front and center now for the next year as Jupiter enters the sign of Leo. Not all of these themes will be nearly as “positive” and “light” as the solar affiliation of Leo might suggest. Especially considering the fact that for much of the first half of Jupiter’s transit through Leo it will be squaring Saturn in Scorpio. The clash between Senex (old person) and Puer (youth) may be incredibly strong for the next 4-6 months now. It’s something to keep our eye on…it’s especially likely that more scandals involving parents or fathers or men and children will keep popping up in the headlines.

Aside from this mundane overview, there is of course so much depth and soulfulness to the sign of Leo that we need to understand as Jupiter enters this intensely fixed fire sign…

Skip past the images of celebrities, center of attention sluts, and big ego maniacs….burp out the word “narcissism” in all its fatty overuse (a word that is as bad for the heart as diet coke is to the soda addict). If we really want to know Leo, then we have to go into the color green and we have to picture it in the midst of a tremendously stable fire, situated not just in the “chest,” or the physical “heart” region, but running up and down the spinal column, fluidly…and capped by two horizontal streaks of hot blue at the crown and the toes….the “I”

The word “ego” means “I,” and it is first and foremost an action (not a concept). From this green in the midst of fire, there comes a total unification between the thought, the image, the fantasy, and the action or the will. When we act (fire) in fusion with our heart, the thoughts of our heart, the fantasies of the soul (the green), we are centralizing and unifying our identity through this action called “I.”

The heart of the Lion is where the fantasy of personal belief and personal will fuse and coagulate into a wholeness we like to call “self,” (the most religious among us will be sure to capitalize this Leonine action..THE SELF).

It is the fusion at the heart of the Sun…

The Leonine quest is always about coming into a tight personal conformity with the thoughts of the heart. When this happens there is always the belief or the experience of thoughts collapsing into identity or reality…as though thoughts and actions are separate and in need of unification through the will power…”I believe strongly enough in these thoughts to make them more than just thoughts…to make them ME or to make them REAL.” We also hear the Leonine belief that “I am not my thoughts,” which is like the pre workout warmups for people who are always trying to fully unify their fantasies with actions…

This authoritarian courageousness is what it means to be the King or Queen. It’s what it means to be at the “center.” It’s a kind of coagulation and singularity that is as hot, white, bright, and life giving as the Sun. At the same time Leo’s shadow is that it tends to forget the multiplicity of the thoughts of the heart that it is always working to unify through its will, courage, and self belief. In other words, Leo often forgets the Venusian green, and its polymorphous wanderings, it’s imagination, that dances ever elusively within the fire…giving it variety, options, and choices. Leo forgets to honor the muses…

Children are excellent examples of the green and the fire of the heart remaining in close/conscious contact. A child tries on its courage and will power like a costume. A child selects fantasies of the heart and steps into them, fully, if only to look at the world temporarily through the appearance of a new “singleness of thought.” We laugh because the child is “playing,” and yet for most adult Leos it remains the same. To try our hand at the game of SELF, or the game of UNIFICATION requires a courage that has its roots in make believe…a fantastic game that is much more than mature or immature, true or false.

When we take this game literally, as the only game, or as the only REAL game, then we are doing one of two things. One, we are choosing to participate in a monotheistic dimension of reality…packed with club words like “oneness,” “ocean,” “sacred,” “unity,” and so forth (no problem with this, but obviously it can lead to cyclopic fundamentalism). Or two, we are entering a grail quest of some kind, and will likely have tunnel vision until we’ve exhausted our interest in the “particular” grail.

The beauty of the grail quest isn’t the grail at the end of the story. It’s the Leonine fact that the grail quest itself is eternal, and never ending. Going on the quest for the grail means drinking from the cup of life well before we’ve found it. At some point this recognition leads us off from the literal quest for the literal cup…and we return to the “green dancers” in the midst of the flames…

In conclusion, some practical advice for the next year of Jupiter in Leo:

1. What do you believe in? Identify with it strongly, but not so strongly that you lord over others and other beliefs or quests…
2. What is your destiny? Will it into existence…but not so strongly that you forget the fantasy muses, or the many, that inspire these visions.
3. What brings you joy? Identify with it fully, but don’t lose sight of the playfulness of your joy..it is based in the imaginal realms…jungle upon jungle of green.
4. Where are you selling yourself short? No longer!
5. Where do you need to be bigger, bolder, and more courageous? Do it but also learn how to bring others into the same sunlight.

Prayer: The thought of the lion warms so to life, is so in conformity with the world, that its thought is one with will, displaying itself in the world, enthroned as king, yellow as daylight, loud as a roar, fixed as dogma….because it emanates like the sun into the world and remains disguised in that conformity with its motion. –James Hillman