Editor’s Note: The following article was written by Suzanne White, and it explores the Oxen personality, and, in particular, Oxes that are Leos. Barack Obama is a Leo/Ox: he was born on Aug. 4, 1961. Have a look at the profile below and see how it fits with our new president’s personality, or the Leo/Ox you know and love. To read more from Suzanne White on the Year of the Ox, click here. –RA
Leadership and dominion combine here to create an unforgettably forceful personality type. The tone of rapport with Leo/Oxen never feels quite intimate or cozy enough. One wonders if there is really a heart beating inside their dense ribcages or whether they are propelled by some remote control device in their garage. This assessment of the indifferent attitude that the Leo/Ox emanates is perhaps harsh, or may seem unfair. But the Leo/Ox is so austere in manner that it’s difficult not to imagine him as obdurately insensitive.
Leo/Oxen get places. They never cease pushing and advancing and arriving at goal upon goal despite hurdle after hurdle. We usually admire the Leo/Oxen that we meet and we cannot help but admit that they are amazing: strong, courageous and, most of all, effective. Leo/Oxen take the reins in every situation and when they are onto a project or idea, they never let up until they have mastered it.
These people are opportunists and do not hesitate before the dark wall of the devil. They plunge through fire and never flee conflict.
Normally, Leo/Oxen don’t talk very much. Around the house or office, they come off as strong but silent, even stodgy personages. It’s always obvious that Leo/Ox feels himself individual and separate from the group. And if he involves himself at all in any group endeavor or communion, he must have center stage, do all the talking, crack all the jokes and generally hold forth. Now, all of a sudden, in company with a captive audience, the Leo/Ox becomes gregarious. When he is listened to, the Leo/Ox is an orator, a performer, a fabulous synthesizer of information and a raconteur par excellence.
Leo/Oxen are “know-it-all” types and rarely let anyone get a word in edgewise when they speak. They are not too curious about others’ opinions or reflections on their views. The Leo/Ox is the personification of the Father Knows Best approach. He is the first and final judge of what is suitable and intelligent. If you have a different opinion, keep it. When there is a Leo/Ox in the room, everybody present is on his show. He is intransigently, tenaciously and arrogantly there. You are mere decoration.
The Leo/Ox character seeks permanence and longs for solidity in both personal and public ways. He is as earthy as they come and seems to need to sop up warmth from the outside, to hold on tight to love and marriage and dreams of home and family for dear life. Yes, he is successful and unbeatably strong. But it can get lonely inside that autocratic head. And the Leo/Ox needs somebody else to turn on the heat. He can build and make and do anything at all humanly possible — except simple tenderness. Expressions of affection are not given to the Leo/Ox, and when you get to know them well, you realize that what’s lacking weighs them down.
These people have great minds and good memories. In fact, they have trouble forgetting — and forgiving. Humility escapes them. If they goof, they don’t want it to show. Failure is not acceptable.. If someone near to their heart disappoints them, they don’t just pass it off as unfortunate or even sad. They take it as a personal affront to their dignity. And they cannot, will not, humble themselves to retrieve lost love.
Although this person is brilliant at order and runs a tight ship, his life will be missing a certain spontaneity. He prefers plans and schedules to the impromptu gathering or hurry-up picnic in the park. He’s rigidly concerned about his image and maintaining the same vis-a-vis his subjects. This, of course, cuts down on the Leo/Ox’s jolly times. He’s active and busy and energetic in the extreme. But the Leo/Ox is nonetheless ponderous and somehow, despite the velocity of his life, leadenly slow.
Love
For the Ox, romantic love is frequently reduced to the common denominator of sexuality. The Leo is, however, armed by the Sun with inner glowing heat. A Leo/Ox will not be cold in bed nor will he reject the idea of sentiment or sweetness. But he will find it difficult to engage in the frolicsome aspect of love. He cannot forget to take everything seriously.
What the Leo/Ox needs as a mate or lover is someone whose sense of permanence helps get the fun together for him. Leo/Oxen are so exaggeratedly sensible that they need to be tickled and teased and learn to accept being jollied up and cheered along by a perfectly adoring and sweet-natured partner.
The real victory in fact, over the Leo/Ox’s dense murk of gravity, is to make him laugh, loosen up and enjoy. If you love an Ox born in Leo, you will surely admire him as well. But that is the easy part. Get him to join a roller-skating club or do yoga. Relax him and limber up the stiff-old-geezer part of his nature. He’ll love you for it and he will never let you down — so long as you obey his every order and don’t get out of hand.
Compatibilities
Green light for Rats, Snakes and Roosters of the Aries, Gemini, Libra, Sagittarius and Capricorn class. Scorpio and Taurus/Dragons are off limits for you, as well as Scorpio and Aquarius/Tigers. Taurus/Monkeys annoy you with their eternal antics. And Goats? You eat Goats for breakfast.
Home and Family
The Leo/Ox’s home environment will be orderly and impressive. He has always just redecorated and built new closets and bookshelves and had walls removed so that his huge dining table will be better accommodated. Leo/Oxen are big eaters and can learn to be good cooks. They work very hard and need a study or office in their house as well as outside. All will be designed for order and planned to the last butter knife and fish fork for efficient and clean-cut living.
As for his relationships with family and siblings, the Leo/Ox will of course, as always, take all ties and kinships seriously. If he gives a dinner party and doesn’t invite his cousins and nieces and nephews, then he’ll give them a special party of their own the next week. Leo/Oxen are authoritarian but they like to be thought of as fair and just, too.
Woe unto the child of a Leo/Ox who doesn’t toe the mark, work well in school, follow in his mother or father’s well-established social pattern and do as he is told and not what he wishes with his life. The Leo/Ox gives everything to his kids. He provides them with an array of activities and high-minded outings and holidays and clothes and glut of every possible sort. Leo/Ox is an able and sure-footed family person. But he’s also positively dictatorial. If the spoiled kid with all the toys and clubs and sports doesn’t do what Mama Leo/Ox or Papa Leo/Ox demands, he is exiled.
Leo/Ox kids are impressively self-contained. They want to be allowed to remain separate from the kiddie nucleus and will try to order younger brothers and sisters around. The best environment for a Leo/Ox child is among his peers, where he may find other people of similar strength and sovereignty to learn from. He needs to be taught humility and the value of lightness and frivolity. But he doesn’t learn those qualities easily.
Profession
The Leo/Ox character requires enormous challenge just to get through the day. He is not interested in crazy new notions or zany schemes. He wants to work and achieve and get on with his career. He must be cajoled and coaxed to want to have fun. Mind you, when inspired, Leo/Oxen can be very amusing. They have an uncanny ability to satirize. But their aura is stodgy. And they struggle and plod and drudge toward every performance.
Now, you cannot very well put a person like this behind a counter in a five and dime. He’ll take over the whole joint in 10 seconds, replace the manager and rearrange the working schedule. Leo/Oxen cannot possibly be asked to perform subordinate roles in their professional lives. Hence, they need to be independent. They must have a sound education and prepare themselves for their work from an early age. They will always rise to the top of any career organization-slowly perhaps, but intensely and certainly. Bossing is the Leo/Ox’s mission in life.
Career possibilities for the Leo/Ox are best selling novelist, Noble Prize winning journalist, president in charge of presidents, king, queen, pope, Dalai Lama, imam or, at the least, chancellor of the exchequer. Another possibility is film director, or any job where a combination of talent for story-telling and dictatorial management is required.
Famous Leo/Oxen: Napoleon, Oscar Peterson, Russell Baker, Darry Cowl, Dustin Hoffman, Louis Armstrong, Menachem Begin, Mikis Theodorakis, Oscar Peterson, Robert Hirsch, Robert Redford, Rudy Valee, Yves Duteil and, you guessed it, Barack Obama.
This reading of Leo/Ox doesn’t sound like Obama in many ways. I think his chart must show other things that make him the way he is. Obama is too willing to listen and take into account the ideas of others to be like a dictator. He makes it a point to work with others and garner agreement between opposing factions; distators don’t do that, they just bulldoze over the opposition and “have it their way.” I see Obama being humble, something the Leo/Ox description says he wouldn’t be so I am sure other things in his chart may hve helped that.
These differences could also be from Obama’s three characteristics that the MSM have yet to talk much about. Obama is a Generation Jones http://www.generationjones.com/2008election.html and as such, he embodies the pragmatism of that generation. Gen Jones were too late to be Boomers, didn’t have to serve or fear the draft for Viet Nam, saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy as kids, came of age in the 80’s and as such, didn’t get the promise of prosperity the Boomers got. They are less idealistic and in-your-face demanding than the Boomers but yet not as cynical as the Gen Xers. Gen Jones learned to keep quite; they learned that the front man in any change movement gets killed so as kids, they learned to run under the radar which is why they love the internet. For Obama to get up and be the front man is really stretching himself because Gen Jones folks do have that innate fear of being the front man.
Obama is also a Trans or Third Culture Kid (TCK) which means he spent considerable time in his childhood in a different culture from his birth culture and as such, he inhabits a third culture that blends the two within himself. TCKs are far more world-wise, able to see the bigger picture, are more cosmopolitan, egalitarian, open minded and willing to hear and even consider very foreign and different vewipoints. TCKs also have inner grief they have to deal with; grief over the loss of friends and their ability to fit in anywhere. TCKs belong everywhere and nowhere so they never feel completely comfortable in any place. They are great at bringing different people together and getting them to see each other’s viewpoints.
The last item is that Obama is also biracial and while that may seem like less of an issue to many today, it was more of an issue when he was growing up. Being biracial means he is again in no-man’s land because he fits in neither white or Black society completely and as such, has bits of both worlds within himself. Many bi-racial kids of the 60’s were not accepted by either side in their communities; we see his angst in his book about himself.
These things may have tempered our Leo/Ox president so that he isn’t as dictatorial as the above Leo/Ox description. As a Gen Jones and TCK myself, I really identify with the traits of those things in Obama; traits that I see in myself.
Back when Barack and Hillary were head to head running against each other in the primaries, I looked them both up in Suzanne’s book. Incredible that she recommended, for example, king of kings for Barack, and something like Queen (I don’t recall exactly) for Hillary. Even now they are being called “a team of rivals.” Suzanne White’s book, and the research and whatever else it took to write it, are sheer genius. I could never recommend a book as highly as this one. When I discovered it, I immediately went out and bought copies for several of my friends.
As a postscript let me add that I lived in Japan for a decade, and they take the Chinese horoscope typology pretty straight-facedly and seriously, perhaps more seriously than they take the typology based on blood type (A B O). Japanese, as you all may have heard, have fairly rigid concepts of what constitutes good social order. You will often hear Japanese people remark about how significant and meaningful is the melieu of their same birth year. They start the school year in the Spring in Japan, so the cohorts are more likely to be all of the same Chinese sign (I believe). Another thing, it’s not unusual at all for Japanese people to keep in touch with their elementary school cohorts for all of their lives, having reunion parties, etc., all along the way.
P.S. I am an Earth Ox myself, and as a gift from the cosmos today, Jonathan Cainer responed to my question on the front page of his site! YEAH!