INTRODUCTORY ESOTERIC ASTROLOGY

INTRODUCTORY ESOTERIC ASTROLOGY

LEO 2009

Labor of Hercules
Slaying of the Nemean Lion

Chase Lion in circles to Cave, block one entrance, leave weapons behind, and strangle Lion (little-ego personality),
unseen by the people.

Motto: I am That and That am I
(Leo seeks release in Scorpio)

Leo and Spiritualized Leadership
Esoterically, Leo relates the divine Trinity to the solar Quaternary. This is the reason it is so central in relationship to Humanity. On this level it represents and illustrates the Hylozoistic principle that all creation has consciousness and sentiency. It is the understanding that we are all cells in the Body of God. Many Christians talk of the Church as Christ’s Body, not realizing this already includes the entire world, confessed Christian or not. Few entertain thoughts of God’s Soul or Monadic nature, although those are present and hidden in the various doctrines of the Trinity in world religions — as an allegory of facts later to be discovered and shared.

Leo represents the little human ego as well as the larger human Egoic nature of the soul (triadic or monadic). It represents identity and self-possession through self-consciousness — but on what level? On a tangent, With mystical God-consciousness there is no need for egomaniacal fabrications. It is a very simple direct and inner reality. We are all God in that we are God-conscious of Responsibility as cells in His Body. As mature stewards or mediators between God and the lower kingdoms in His creation of Nature, we are responsible for loving purposive intelligent cooperation for planetary homeostasis and health. Deity could choose not to incarnate through His creation or through His Son, or the Christ nature, and the world would come to a temporary end. Humanity would be held in suspension to be seeded later on the planet, or to be transferred to another planetary system altogether. Christ’s comment of “suffer the little children” was probably not a sarcastic aside to his 12 apostles, but an advisory as to the reality of the undeveloped state of human consciousness and behavior. Unfortunately, a great number of ‘adult-children’ see this as a command to become little children in their relationship with God and Christ nature, a perfect excuse for the apologetics of forgiveness for all the idiocies that we as humans tend to indulge. However, Life moves on, and Time is the great healer and instructor of humanity. We are meant to be ancients, elders, adults, youths, and children simultaneously. As souls, we have given birth to ourselves as bodies on Earth, as reflections of Souls in the Body of God. As humans, our physical bodies are composed of substance no lower than the 4th etheric. It is the Mother principle that gives us our flesh and substance – solid, liquid, and volatile. We are souls and spirits who produce the ‘quickening’ of the womb around the 4th month of gestation, when soul actually takes on substance as a vesture. But this is a Cancer and Virgo topic in relation to Leo. It is also the birth of the incipient Christ-nature in matter.

Leo’s power of the centralized Ego depends on power and development of sensitivity and consciousness of one’s inner and environing circumstances. The human Ego must conquer its strictly animal nature by becoming supersensitive on all levels — etheric, psychic/subtle, and spiritual or fiery.

Then one must conquer one’s own sensitivity through spiritual discernment, learning not to instinctively react to immediate and surface perceptions (usually through a series of embarrassing or humiliating experiences and lifetimes).

The Five human animal instincts must be transmuted into their higher correspondences. These transmuted instincts are then subjected to the Seven Means of Soul Control through their ray associations. Instinct is eventually transcended through Jupiter and Pluto in relation to Gemini. Instinct is important to Leo because Leo acts from Being — limited by degree and focus of Consciousness. Leo radiates. It is the radiation of Being that must master consciousness and naturally transfigures the Form. Hence the Leo emphasis on Life and Consciousness over Form. The result is the Quality aspect.

This is illustrated by the 3 solar rulers of the sign Leo associated with the three aspects of the Sun — the central spiritual Sun (Pluto, Vulcan, Uranus), the Heart of the Sun (Neptune, Jupiter, Venus, Mercury), and the physical Sun (the Grand Trigon 20-year generational conjunctions of Saturn and Jupiter, Saturn ruling the solar physical permanent atom and Jupiter the 3 major forces pouring through the physical Sun). The physical Sun rules the status quo establishment of any given society — the greasy pole for ambitious human animals, and the natural field of expression of social Responsibility for Souls. Later the field of divine mediation and liberation come to the fore.

Leadership comes naturally to Leo due to its intense self-consciousness. Leo has the possibility of transcending the type of false or petty leadership that comes from political popularity contests on the level of junior-high peer-herd mentality, or from primitive political groups that fight to preset the agenda of political discussion, including those proud of employing ‘dirty tricks.’ In the developed Leo, one’s Peers become a smaller group, fighting for full Responsibility, for full Being and for the Greater Life “within which we live, move and have our being” (St. Paul).

Leadership based on the self-arrogating entitlement and unwarranted presumptions of the primitive ambitious Leo subject, based on and fueled by infantile and unselfconscious bullshitting, manipulative coercion/control, and ill-suited delegating skills is replaced by a sense of belonging to a very large family of difficult personalities who must be given place and opportunity to train themselves.

As Talleyrand once observed, “Since the masses are always eager to believe something, for their benefit nothing is so easy to arrange as facts [or human factors].” Here is a Leonine type commenting on Cancerian herd or mass consciousness. His observation is also relevant in accomplishing high purpose. After all, he wrote the Declaration of Man and the Citizen, and introduced public education which included women in France. Having partially transcended the ambitious human animal nature, the Leo must learn to express love and responsibility intelligently on a human animal level in animal (nonverbal) language. The Anima Mundi is composed of (3rd kingdom and human) animal souls, human souls, and spiritual souls or the divine Ego on its own plane (triadic or monadic). This breadth of self-conscious scope is necessary in order to reach and salvage the Red Cattle of Geryon on Island Earth, neoplatonically speaking, the “prisoners of the planet” incarnate and incarcerated in human animal bodies.

The Leo Identity principle is associated with integration of individual character as well as integration of the individual within society. Ruled by the Sun on three levels, Vulcan’s influence of forging an integrated system is strong in Leo. While Vulcan’s results are strength and resilience, Fire has a fluidic aspect as wielded by Vulcan with rhythm. It is a second-aspect or Ray Two expression of will, identified with Mercury and the Sun.

Integration with society is a challenge if one is unique, exceptional, or has a mission orientation. It is also a challenge if one is immersed in society, unreflective and undiscerning regarding status quo conditioning, and if self expression is unreflective and devoid of conscious identity. The challenge for a Leo is to blend strong identity with a resilient social integration.

Socially conservative and progressive trends and factions need each other in a dynamic living society. In a way ‘liberalism’ expresses only the mediating quality of choice or preference. Conservatives find the term progressive difficult because it reveals the shortcomings of struggling for status-quo and generally unreflective tradition. Conservatism often suggests ignoring the future and the inevitability of evolution for an attachment to transient or dead form and (form consciousness). It would prefer to tilt at wishy-washy windmills of arbitrary choice. It is safer, generates more confusion of discourse, which reinforces trust in status-quo ‘conservative values.’ Progress is interpreted materialistically, not socially. On the other end, all activists are not progressives, but they keep things moving along rather than obstructed or congested.

Saturn-Uranus periods in particular bring out all these challenges in an intense way since they represent the opposite poles of the three Leo rulerships — personal vs. hierarchical or solar-planetary. (We are experiencing 5 Saturn-Uranus oppositions from 11/4/2008 to 7/26/2010.) Neptune-Vulcan, those ineffable opposites of vibration and sacrifice of form, are the planetary rulers for Leo on the soul level. Neptune rules the refining and mystical mediation of lower and higher, necessitating a Protean form. Vulcan supervises the impact of vibration and use of rhythm for the higher interlude of the reintegration process during simultaneous and inevitable impacts of disintegration. When you think about it, Neptune and Vulcan have both a higher and lower guidance function.

Leadership is essentially a group-conscious process. A central leader must be exceptionally sensitive to the relationship with his group of advisors as they relate to and interpret facts on the ground, oncoming trends, and consult historical perspective. This is rarely found. A true leader is essentially the spiritual focus of group-consciousness of a governing group functioning in a much larger arena.

Leadership involves intelligent loving service through purposes and programs arrived at by a group sensitive to social and world responsibility and refined by years of experiencing the backlash to high ideals. Leadership through will is insufficiently inclusive in vision, capacity, and scope. Leadership through mere ambitious self-will brings on its own destruction. True sensitivity and leadership capacity create their own opportunities and condition the Three Worlds, rather than submit to their common conditioning. The quality of results is something for historians to analyze and discuss. The quality of causative Being and Consciousness involved is a point of discussion for esotericists.

This is the mission of a true Leonine or Herculean leader. A leader focused in Being recognizes that necessity in others (fully self-conscious Being) and fights to provide it in a living (rather than dead or comatose) social system.

Inspiration: Alice A. Bailey, Esoteric Astrology, and her 24 books on esoteric philosophy.
NY: Lucis Publishing Company – website (http://www.lucistrust.org/en/publications_store).

Source: Alice A. Bailey, A Treatise on Cosmic Fire. . NY: Lucis Publishing Co., 1925, 1962 ed., 1982 pr.
Source: H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, Centennial facsimile ed. Los Angeles. Theosophical University Press, 1988.