With the Sun in Capricorn and the Moon in Leo, it’s time to get to grips what who and what we are.
At its heart, Leo is about identity – not just awareness of ego wants and needs or even the personality, the mask worn whilst on the ‘stage of life’. This is about the very nature of humanity. ‘We are stardust, we are golden’, sang Joni Mitchell. In doing so, she was echoing Psalm 8, which reminds us that we are ‘a little lower than the angels’. But what might this really mean?
One of the primary problems which Existentialism has tried to highlight is how little we Westerners understand ourselves, our human nature, and the forces by which our human nature has been formed. Historically, these forces divide neatly into two opposing camps: Hebraism focusing on what ‘s wrong with us and Hellenism, focusing on what’s right. But here’s the rub: it’s all very well focusing, as did the ancient Greeks, on attaining perfection but for us in the West, there’s always something that gets in the way of this and that something, which we’ve inherited from the ancient Hebrews, is sin.
This leaves us in a lurch, stuck in the mind/body split from which we may never recover, at least not until we can do better than either (1) the ancient Greeks, who, unable to deal with bodily mortality, remained in their heads and thus in touch with eternity or (2) the ancient Hebrews, who after that incident with the snake in the Garden of Eden, came face-to-face with the reality of their mortality.
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am … (an) immortal diamond.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, born 28 July 1841 – Sun in Leo/Moon in Capricorn
Moon Tracking 