Astrology of Now: Dream of Your Self

Shiva, god of tranformation, dances his cosmic dance within a ring of fire.
Image courtesy Wikemedia Commons. Art by Arumugam Manivelu.
Copyright Himalayan Academy Publications.

As I start to write this, the Sun, Venus and Mercury are clustered at the Midheaven in Leo. The Sun is super-powerful his own sign for just a few more days of brilliance.
One of the jobs of the sign of Leo is self-expression and one of his routes to this is self-exploration. This is why Leo has such a reputation as an egotist.

Leo's core question is: who am I? A question that never has a final answer, of course, because each time we think we've pinned down who we are, we change.

Every day we are the same; and every day we change.

As a fixed sign, Leo is looking for the essence, that inner unchanging me-ness. The core thing that always makes you, you…Elusive.

This is not a sign of collective; Leo is an individualist.

Meanwhile, collectively, our individualism has been under huge, subtle pressure for the past decade. Why?

Neptune has been in Leo's opposite sign, Aquarius, the sign of the collective conscious. The sign of the conformist non-conformist, the groupie. If Leo asks who am I, then Aquarius asks who are we?

And the answer to that last question? It's turned out to be a bit of a Neptunian sham, hasn't it? We turn out to be (as a group) poorer, less glamourous, less powerful, less sophisticated than (perhaps) we thought. A case of mistaken identity.

Right now, the Sun and Neptune are having their final face-off across this particular pair of signs. Neptune moves on into Pisces in February for good. This is the last encounter with this energy in our lifetime, so it's worth really thinking about.

So what is the up side of this particular encounter?

We have the Sun (ego), Venus (beauty) and Mercury (retrograde but there nonetheless aa intelligence) in Leo one of the most powerfully creative signs, linking directly with imagination (Neptune).

If you dream of something rare and beautiful right now, make a note of it, draw it, write a poem, dance, dream. What you find now could have profound meaning for both your own sense of identity, and your own sense of who we are.

I leave you with this from Walt Whitman (Moon  °28 Leo)

"I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. "
from Song of Myself

That reminds me of Shiva's dance.