a Leo new moon + eclipse
what have you sacrificed on the altar of applause?
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this Thursday, at 3:37am Australian Eastern Time, the new moon goes exact in Leo, forming a Total Solar Eclipse.
traditionally, eclipses have been viewed by the ancients as bad omens; and while I don’t personally believe that the second the sun goes dark a vast portal into the hellish netherworlds will open beneath you and drag you down into its murky depths, this isn’t a happy-go-lucky lunation. the sun being obscured and “overpowered” in the sun’s own sign of kingship, leadership, the Ruler… the symbolism is almost comically obvious. I don’t want to get too specific on how this eclipse is going to be showing itself in the collective story, but suffice it to say it will be a time of de-pedestaling. celebrity culture goes to die under a Leo total solar eclipse, and anyone on the public stage who are glutting themselves on adoration and veneration they haven’t earned will find their crumbling pedestals unable to hold their weight much longer.
on an individual level, I love Leo myths. I love the Hero’s Journey type Call To Adventure that is leaving the nurturing, cocooning, Lap-Of-The-Mother-coded womb that is Cancer… and jumping out into the world for the performance of a lifetime. all the world’s a stage, after all. may we play our parts with gusto.
Leo tells the story of the Solar Self, and the way that performance… and the characters + costumes involved… can take us closer to ourselves… instead of further away. Leo is the masks we wear giving us more permission to take up space, to declare ourselves, to live into our bold authenticity… rather than less.
Leo is glamour and audacity, yes. it’s a bright red lip and loud colourful earrings at the local fruit and veg market, just because. it’s the ferocious glow-up after heartbreak, and the inclination towards bold colours because visibility feels good.
wander into a tangent about glamour with me for a moment. it matters, I promise.
in the classical / old-timey sense, glamour was less about the beauty myth of the day and holding oneself to the arbitrary standards it set, and more about occult magicks - the kind of spellcasting that changed something into extreme beauty, seduction, attractiveness… by way of mysticism and enchantment. the Leo-ruled part of your chart then, is the part of you that can magickally transfigure something that would have appeared to less enchanted eyes as mundane or ordinary…into something miraculous.
for example, if you have Leo over your first house, then your capacity for magick and enchantment; for glamour; is in the way you continually press yourself up against the inside of your own skin and become yourself. more on this later when we get into specific horoscopes for the eclipse through all twelve houses.
it’s also interesting to note here that glamour in its original meaning is connected deeply to grammar - as in, spelling and sentence structure and so-called “higher learning”. it was said that this knowledge, especially in women, was to be viewed with deep suspicion. it suggested occult origins, mysticism, witchcraft. women and non-men surely couldn’t do things like read and write and think for themselves, unless of course they were witches. feel the audacity here for a moment. feel the sashaying hips, the twinkle in the eye, the rolling back shoulders of the witches and enchantresses of old who dared to take up space as being learned, out loud.
I say all of this to expand on the poetry of Leo. the myths we’re living into here are delicious. they are the awakening of the spirit into the second act of individuation - the part of the journey where we not only realise we are a person… we’re also a personality.
you could very easily strip all this poetry back to the fact that in essence, successfully navigating the terrain of Leo mythology, moving through this second act rite with intention, awareness, consciousness, is one way of describing enlightenment. it’s the alchemical marriage between the Self that is the Not-Self, the Everything, the Spirit, the connection to Divinity and the All That Is, the Holy Guardian, whatever you prefer to call it… and the Self that is Ego, personality, construct, memory. never getting overly attached to either. never getting lost on either side. holding the paradox between the distinct awareness of both Selves as separate (the solve) and the embodied awareness of total unification (the coagula).
there is a shadow here though, and I'm sure you can feel it already.
ruled by Sol, the only sign on the whole wheel that shines so brightly and for its own sake, warming the world with its own light (rather than the reflected light), the shadow then tends to be correspondingly darker. the light that shines here can be blinding if we look directly at it for too long, and when its obscured, the shadow it casts will clutch at us so tightly that we can stop noticing it’s there at all.
when we lapse into forgetting that the performance Leo calls us into is just a game, that the characters we’re playing aren’t real (not really real), then the masks and the costumes we wear become inescapable. we find ourselves trapped on a stage of our own creation, desperately addicted to the applause and the validation the masks and the costumes award us, to the point where we become the performance. eventually, we are hollowed out to the point where the performance we’ve mistaken for really real is all that exists, and there’s nothing else left of us.
by the time this hollowing happens, the essence of us has been suppressed so completely that our will is no longer our own, and our choices no longer belong to us. we could live an entire life from this place, never experiencing a single moment of Free Will. beloved reader, please feel the gravity of this for a moment. contextualise it within the story of end-stage capitalism, collapsing empire, and the hierarchies we’re socialised into as part of western modernity. feel into the weight these performances carry. the capitalist accolades, the arbitrary ladders we climb, the conditioning that keeps us from ever really meeting or knowing ourselves except as the identity that empire built.
when you are trapped inside of a performance, as capitalist patriarchy so violently demands and rewards… you do not have free will.
this is the Capital-T-Truth that this eclipse is calling us into.
unless you individuate, unless you become fully conscious of the performances you’re living into and the characters you play (so that you are able to play those characters in a way that liberates you… instead of traps you)… your life is not your own.
it’s worth noting that at the moment the eclipse goes exact, Leo is more crowded than it’s been in a long time. Sol and Luna are cosying up with Jupiter in his opposition with Pluto, while Mercury adds a layer of swiftness and intellectual curiosity to all of the trines with Saturn and Neptune and the South Node intensifies the potency of release and upheaval this eclipse brings. (see below).
together, this tells a story of intense reckoning with the part of us that desperately longs for the Free Will of individuation from indoctrination, but isn’t able to experience it. illusions are collapsing under this eclipse. if you are not already interrogating the myths you live into and perpetuate with your choices, then the gap that’s been created between the Self and the Performance will widen into a chasm, and the split will become too painful to ignore. if you are interrogating those myths already, this eclipse might feel like a time of grief. grief for the years you lived before your own awakening… and grief for the collective, as we witness a mass-extinction event, the collapse of empire, and the potential destruction of a liveable future as a result of a systemic refusal to either grant, celebrate, or embrace Free Will.
this eclipse is going to feel particularly intense for those of you with strong fixed energy (lots of Leo / Aquarius / Taurus / Scorpio in your chart), make sure you’ve booked yourself a reading if that’s you, so that we can get all up in your chart about how this eclipse is going to be moving through the story your aliveness is telling ✨
keep reading for your full horoscope of this eclipse & the astrological weather around it according to your rising sign…
