Carly's Astrology Blog

Unlike the soft, pouting, etherealized sexuality of her astrological neighbor, Cancer, there is nothing ethereal about a Leo woman. Unlike her subtler, wetter counterparts, Leo is obvious, almost obtusely so. She isn’t particularly intellectual or superiorly beautiful, nor is she terribly caring or nurturing. As a fixed fire sign with a masculine polarity, she isn’t a paragon of natural poise nor a possessor of that magical, subtle feminine mystique that we all salivate over. The trait that singularly puts Leo woman in a separate, elevated category from her female counterparts is her intense creative spark and her invisible bloated testicles, it is her moxie.

Unlike Scorpio, who is emotionally intense (fixed/water), Leo (fixed/fire) possesses the intense creative energy of free will. Being internally motivated by something more elusive and powerful than emotion or intelligence, Leo is intrinsically motivated by an invisible, inextricable spark of sunshine which pours out of her like molten hot lava. She pursues life with an inspired exactitude that leaves the sloppy, half-baked efforts of others depressingly inferior. When Leo woman is gyrating to her own music on stage, she does so maniacally. When she loves you, she does so violently. When she writes about herself in her blog, she does so with such a powerfully impassioned self-love that it becomes endearing. When she loves you, she loves you to the depths of your soul. When she scrubs a toilet, she fucking scrubs a toilet. Leo woman may not appreciate and admire you like a Libra, or nurture you like a Cancer, but Leo is heart, she is love, she is hot pink sunshine, and who doesn’t want to be enveloped in that?

Leo’s luminary ruler is the sun. The alchemical symbol for the sun (as well as the self) is represented by a mandala, a circle with a dot in its center. The circle represents the path of self discovery; the dot represents the mysteries of the individual self… that is, the true self, or what Buddhism refers to as the Diamond Self (Hinduism refers to it as the Atman). The sun, like the self, represents autonomy and individuation. All monotheistic religions share a common origin in the heliocentric Kurgan culture, suggesting the solar principle is both personal and patriarchal, as all monotheistic religions are based on the individual’s relationship with deity, rather than the society’s relationship with deity writ large. Hence, solar-based religion is fundamentally about understanding the true self. In the monotheistic ethos, The Diamond or True Self is the alchemical Tartarus Mundi, the central salt-point of the universe into which all things collapse. Just as all spatial lines ultimately vanish at a single identifiable point in our spherical universe, all of reality disappears with the individual. Thus, the Leo glyph represents the most elemental enigma we all must confront in life: who am I really, and what is my purpose, my place in the universe?

Mandalas and acts of circumambulatory meditation have been used as spiritual tools in Hindu, Abrahamic, Buddhist, and Cabbalistic spiritual traditions since time immemorial. At its core, the solar archetype is what Jung refers to as “the circumambulation of the self,” as we meditatively concentrate on the centripetal force of the sun or mandala’s center, all other realities dissolve, and for a brief moment, we are absolutely nothing but emptiness. This is our true self- what we experience as children when we repeat our names over and over and over again, until our identity loses its significance.

Leos envision themselves as having all the explosive potential of an atom. By exploring and probing the depths of their individual psyche, they expect to release equivalent sums of energy. Leos are existential, self-exploration junkies. Carl Jung and Aldous Huxley, the kings of self-involved psychological exploration, are perhaps two of the most influential Leos of all time. While Gemini’s dynamism is a result of varied experience, Leo’s is driven by an irascible need to know their “true” self. Like Madonna and Dorothy of Oz fame, their journey is an internal one, elaborated on in their dreams. Unlike the Wanderer archetype, they do not search outside of themselves for their spiritual abode; they simply peel back another layer of skin, forever the onion searching its various peels for its soul.

Leo’s goal in life is to know themselves, their REAL SELVES, that golden delicious nugget of pristine truth hidden deep within the auricle of their hearts. While most see Madonna as being mercurial or even schizophrenic in her search for self, trying on new identities and lives like a shapeshifting chimera, its obvious to me that she is simply on a path to becoming a closer approximation of her true self: a spiritual, self-obsessed, perfectionistic, physically strong, disco-sunshine-animal skin clad-kitten who loves kids, clothes, and dancing. In a sentence, that is Leo woman- a fluorescent colored, overly-tan (an imprint of their mid-summer birth and solar archetype), naturally buff (an imprint of their feline heritage), almost always half naked- in particular- topless (a shout-out to their “many breasted” Artemis archetype) slinky lady that is as magnetically irresistible as she is irritatingly big mouthed and destructively hot. That is the hazard of being part sunshine, part wild animal.

The fifth astrological house of Leo encompasses all things revolving around the heart- the pin-dot core of human reality. In Cabala, the number five represents creativity, protection, and sex, the Roman numeral for five (V) has historically been used as a protective marker on shields. Leo reigns over the zodiacal house of passion, love, self-expression, self-actualization, romance, pride, drama, amusement, children, fame, art, dance, games, holidays, imagination, creativity, and renown. In medical astrology, Leo rules over the biological heart. Leo’s home in the human nervous system mirrors her astrological glyph. Leo is the central point in her social circle, often pushing her way into the center of available attention. She operates from the centermost area of her heart, and can be found smack in the center of her protective circle of fire, which simultaneously repels with fear and attracts with lightness, presenting any would-be friend or lover with an almost impassable obstacle: can you cross her personal boundaries without being engulfed in flames; and most importantly, can you love her as much as she loves herself?

Solar ladies are unaware that they are being taboo or violating social norms in their overt self-exposure, they are simply being their obnoxious selves. Leos crave attention, if not harsh scrutiny, obviously a result of her unstable sense of self. Like any attention whore, Leo’s instability is spawned from being ignored as a child. Just as Cancer compensates for her unstable childhood by becoming a gold-digging, Vicodin popping mess, Leo compensates for her latchkey, alienated childhood by foisting herself into the scope of others. She is the neglected kitten, peeing all over your possessions and clawing at your Horchow rug just to remind you that she is important. Leo will whore herself just to feel some false sense of being worshiped, basking in the fleeting glory of being someone’s new favorite thing. The easiest way to identify a Lioness in a crowded room is to select the ruddy lady with the wildest mane, whose laughing a little too loudly while revealing too much about herself. Leo woman is embarrassingly self-revealing, almost pathologically incapable of restraint or self-editing. She is a fire kitten who needs to be known… she has molten hot pink lava boiling over inside of her that she desperately needs to show you. Just accept the hot pink lava spewing out of her like kitty vomit as a gift, a token of her expansive, almost grotesquely over-sized heart. A volcano can’t help but erupt all over you.

Leos make excellent, if not overly-exposed, performers, models, writers, and actors. Lioness Tori Amos is known for furiously masturbating herself on stage while Madonna’s performances can be as disturbingly exhibitionist as a videotaped childbirth. Leos will happily parade around in the most scant bespattering of fabric in the most public of places: Kim Catrall (aka The Slutty One), Natasha Henstridge, Jennifer Lopez, Iman, Halle Berry, Emmanuelle Beart, Vivica A. Fox, Melanie Griffith, Charlize Theron, Jackie Warner, and Geri Halliwell are all lionesses who seem to fundamentally abhor wearing clothing… while other solar maidens reveal themselves through their writing, music, and displays of public pageantry (usually debacles and scandals) which are often engineered by Leo with an overt sense of ego, as if people were DEMANDING to inspect their dirty laundry and they’re simply dishing out what the people have requested: Monica Lewinsky, Sloan Crosley (she writes like a drunk chick incapable of foreshadowing the embarrassment awaiting her the morning after, she has Leo Volcano Syndrome), Dorothy Parker, Sally Struthers, Connie Chung, Loni Anderson, Whitney Houston, Clara Bow, Kate Bush, Martha Stewart, Emily Bronte, Iris Love, Lucille Ball, Coco Chanel, Annie Oakley, Delta Burke, J.K. Rowling, Beatrix Potter, etc. Leos are also excellent politicians; many lionesses thrive off of derivative political power. Leo is one of two power signs, the other being Scorpio. Scorpios and Leos are attracted to one another’s corrupt sense of entitlement to socio-political power. Some of the most famous power couples in the world are scorpion/lion duos: Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Joe Biden and Barack Obama, Bill and Hilary Clinton, Alain and Rosalie Delon, Puff Daddy and J. Lo. Leos also make excellent presidential mates. Take one female Leo, give her a regal sense of above-reprieve exceptionalness and a passionately opinionated political belief, and you have the Annoyingly Self-Righteous Political Wife, some of the most peevish examples being Tipper Gore, Elizabeth Dole, Lynne Cheney, Jackie O, Rossalynn Smith Carter, and Bill Clinton (well, he’s almost a wife, and was almost a First Lady).

The feminine mystique hides under dissimulation, and Leo is just too obnoxious to provide enough omissions, enough ellipses to indicate there’s something more. She’s a cat, and cats only come to you when they have something to purr into your ear. As the consummate cat-fighting, hot blooded bitch of the zodiac, Leo is capable of fending for herself (and inevitably, she must, as anyone who has “put themselves out there” as much as the uncontrollably volcanic Leo can certainly understand). She can be a predatory, staunchly independent, emasculating, calculating, overachieving, overly-competitive workaholic, all depending on how unstable in her sense of place she is. Stable or unstable, Leo is hot strength personified.

In the traditional Marseilles tarot deck, Leo is represented by the eleventh trump card, the Strength or La Force card. This is a transitional card, marking a juncture point in our archetypal journey, as it is the first instance that we encounter a woman in the tarot deck. This maiden is neither an embellished princess nor a stiffly seated, cadaverous priestess; she is an accessible, slightly silly looking Plain Jane (nice hat, Jane). However, she is obviously not an ordinary woman, because ordinary women do not stick their hands (or in later decks, their heads and entire bodies) into the mouths of ferocious lions. Unlike her masculine counterpart, the Magi (represented in the zodiac by Aquarius, Leo’s opposite sign), she uses no tools, no baton or scepter, no potions or electrical conductors to protect her from the animal threat. Her raw audacity doesn’t come from some disposable alien technology- it is indelibly and inalienably a part of herself, her mysterious power is no mystery, it simply comes from her eagerness to make personal contact with something untamed and violent, her willingness to confront the instinctual, pre-cultural aspects of herself.

The Leo archetype has taken on many incarnations in myth and popular culture: Dorothy of the Wizard of Oz, the Greek “virgin-hunter” goddess Artemis/Hestia, the Egyptian Bast or Sekhmet, and the comic book character Cat Woman (played in film and television by, not surprisingly, Leos Julie Newmar and Halle Berry). Like the principle of the Strength tarot card, Artemis/Hestia is virginal and inviolate, untouched by culture. She is a huntress connected with her animal-side, often having a difficult time incorporating herself into the reality of other’s (read: men) due to her feline fixedness and independence.

Not coincidentally, Cat Woman (Leo) has been casted as Batman’s (Aquarius) unrequited, “one true love,” their tumultuously romantic relationship based on both mutual antipathy and deep understanding. Cat Woman is the villainous, anti-heroic side of the vinyl unitard clad couple, while Aquarius is her selfless, humanitarian conspecific. Cat Woman is motivated by personal ends (jewelry, money, self-preservation), while Batman is motivated by social ends (justice, social-order, reformation). Both are vanguard and independent, and as opposite signs in the zodiac, are pulled to each other by a magnetic force.

Aquarius and Leo are opposite signs on the zodiacal wheel, meaning that they represent two sides of the same coin, so to speak. The Strength card presents us with the meaning of the Aquarius and Leo coin: while one performs magic in public, the other performs magic privately, intimately. This is at the essence of what separates Aquarius, the social reformer, from Leo, the existential psychoanalysis junky. While an Aquarius may feel so unhappy in their own life that they find their dissatisfaction spilling out into the public and political domain of unhappiness, Leo will obsess over their personal problems without feeling the least bit compelled to involve themselves with the pain of others. While both are transformative and creative, one is personal, the other impersonal. One is political, the other artistic. One touches many through radio waves and inspired soapbox speeches in the center of public life (like, for example, Aquarians Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln), the other contacts you personally via e-mail and MTV (like Leos Bill Clinton and Barack Obama). You blog politics, I blog astrology.

Leo woman is a control freak intolerant of erraticism, the most defining characteristic of her Uranus and Chiron ruled opposite sign, Aquarius. Leo is liable to smack the weirdness out you, histrionically storming out of her relationships when she detects the least bit of resistance or non-conformity like the royal pain in the ass that she is. As the heart of the zodiac, Leo claws her way into the executive center of any enterprise she’s involved in, appointing herself as the sauciest and most brazen, bossiest bitch of her family, co-workers, home, and partners. Her behavior, more often than not, results in her attracting only the weakest, most passive posse (Pisces, Libra, Cancer, Virgo, Gemini, and Sag) while disaffecting anyone with a backbone (Taurus, Capricorn, Aquarius, Aries, Scorpio, other Leos). Solar ladies, like the sun, embody the male or father principle, and can thus be daddy-like. She is controlling and ritualistic to the extreme. A Leo mother will force her son to wear make-up and a teal sweater set for his school pictures, stomping out any resistance like a matriarchal Gestapo. She’ll take her boyfriend or girlfriend shopping, pick out their clothes, supervise their haircuts, throw out their gummy bears and beer, piss all over their friends and family, clean their room, and, unlike a Scorpio or Virgo, will do so without one iota of subterfuge or kindness. The Leo star invented the celebrity rider, from J Lo’s demands of being surrounded by “all white furnishings,” at all times, to Madonna’s insistance that she exclusively consume only blessed Cabbala water, Leo seeks stability in the silliest of places. The more “off-center” she feels in her sense of selfhood, the more she seeks that stability through asserting her control, moderating her life with an obsessive compulsion that may lead to anorexia, phobias, and an addiction to work- exercise, career, cleaning, and “improvement” -of herself and anything she identifies as being an extension of herself.

Despite all of her selfish, almost infantile sense of egoic importance, Leo lights up those around her like Hestia’s hearth, radiating harsh, yet unconditional love onto those in her inner circle just like the sun. She is a love monster, lighting up the vim around her with her bloated heart… and perhaps at times, unnerving those around her by accidentally loving herself a little too much.