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.