Rays of Life — Sun Enters Leo

Our Sun comes home to Leo on Sunday, seconds after 6 am EDT. With ingress to its domain, the Sun will make simultaneous aspects to three of the smaller objects that make up its solar system: Asbolus, Eros and Dionysus. Taken together, those three objects symbolize three ways of looking at your life that are different, yet compatible. Because the Sun is our source of life, and because Leo is where the Sun rules, the day named after the Sun may be an auspicious time to reflect on how your life can be more compatible with all life.

Whether the astrology be tropical or sidereal, orthodox or esoteric, Leo’s connection with the Sun is unambiguous, elementary, and very nearly exclusive. The elementary relationship between the Sun and Leo speaks of how all life as we know it is connected through a single element, carbon.

What makes the element carbon universal to life as we know it is its ability to form a large number of chemical connections, known as bonds, with a other atoms and molecules. Carbon’s affinity for connection not only makes possible the complex, specific and continuous chemistry necessary to life, it also illustrates a fundamental principal: the fact that life is unavoidably interconnected. The centaur Asbolus is named after a familiar form of carbon — soot.

The name Asbolus literally means ‘soot’, or ‘carbon dust’ in ancient Greek. In the Sabian Symbol for the position of Asbolus in its own discovery chart is a common source of soot, “A blazing fireplace.” Dane Rudhyar’s elucidation of that symbol (for the 8th degree of Libra) emphasizes a “consciousness returning to center.” The mythical centaur after which centaur object Asbolus was named distinguished himself by practicing the consciousness of connection to life’s center.

The mythical Asbolus was unique among the centaurs; he was a prophet. He augured the future by reading the flight of birds as a method of connecting with information flying to and fro through the web of life. His name was ostensibly due to his dark color, and his fate was not taken seriously by his centaur brethren when he foretold and warned of how their behavior could, and did, jeopardize their survival.

The centaur planet Asbolus is also dark in color. It crosses the orbits of Saturn and Uranus, connecting classical planets (and the ancient world) to our modern age. Mark Andrew Holmes connected the classical role of Asbolus to our modern understanding of carbon when he described the astrology of Asbolus as that which “takes life and very seriously, and wants to be taken seriously.”

When the Sun enters fiery Leo on Sunday, it will sextile Asbolus, itself fresh to airy Gemini. The Sun’s aspect to Asbolus will serve to illuminate how modern human behavior regarding fire, air and carbon needs to be taken seriously. For years now, the web of life has been providing us with ample information that human activity has released more carbon into the atmosphere than nature can remove, resulting in the phenomenon known as global warming. Whether or not global warming has gone past the point of no return is not certain. What is certain is that we must cease to emulate the mythical centaurs in willful disregard and take this threat to our survival seriously. What complicates the situation is that our imperative to create and propagate, as symbolized by Eros, has contributed to our peril.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of human beings is civilization. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of civilization has been its failure to integrate Eros without either contradiction or repression. Eros is the imperative to be one and whole with life. That is easy to say, but difficult to achieve consciously. 

The newly Leo Sun makes a fire-to-water square with the main belt (orbiting between Mars and Jupiter) asteroid Eros, equally new to Scorpio. It will serve to illustrate the inner tension that connects us to countless generations of human beings before our own who have felt both bound to and loosened by the need to create and propagate. Unfortunately, the means by which we have organized to express our erotic needs have more often than not served to separate — both human from human, and human from other forms of life. Resolving our ineptitude with Eros is thus intimately and urgently connected with our awakening to Asbolus, requiring nothing less than the risk of intentional transmutation — lest we be transmuted against our intent, out of life entirely. That’s where Dionysus comes in.

When the Sun enters its rulership on Sunday, it will conjoin with the near-Earth asteroid Dionysus, which will have arrived on Leo’s doorstep just hours before. In his influential book Cosmos and the Psyche, Richard Tarnas noted that the mythical Dionysus “was closely associated by the Greeks” with Pluto. The difference being that the transmutation represented by Pluto was compelled from without, and the transformation symbolized by Dionysus is impelled from within. 

All this is not to suggest that the substance abuse frequently associated with the Dionysus myth is the answer to our problems. It is to suggest that the intentional metamorphosis of consciousness itself, as symbolized by the Sun’s conjunction with Dionysus, will be the first order of business after the Sun concludes its journey through Cancer. It begins with recognizing that what has worked against life — all life — is not, in fact, conventional wisdom but madness. The next step is to abandon madness in fact in favor of what can only be called divine madness, the kind that prioritizes life and has the continuation of life as its first premise, not as its first paradox. That will require our consciousness to return to its central association with carbon and creativity so we can, in the words of philosopher Norman O. Brown, “reach out and net impossible things.” Astrology indicates that this coming Sunday would be a good time to start.

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Len is available for astrology readings. You can contact him at lenwallick [at] gmail [dot] com.