Leo 12

Adults gather on a lawn lit by ornamental lanterns for an evening party, fashionable dress and fashionable company assembled for pleasure with no purpose beyond the pleasure itself. Jupiter's decan and Saturn's newly begun term, degrees twelve through eighteen, put the zodiac's most expansive planet in charge of the mood while its most restrictive one quietly governs the boundary around it, festivity contained within a defined evening rather than allowed to run past its edges.

Wheeler gave Jones this picture in Balboa Park in 1925; the reading on this page is Rudhyar's 1973 language, and escape is the operative word, naming the party as relief from something rather than as a pursuit valuable simply on its own terms. The shadow is exactly that: pleasure defined mainly by what it is not, an evening whose lanterns will be put away and whose routine will resume the next morning regardless of how bright the party felt while it lasted. Leo's love of company, display, and being seen enjoying itself is served plainly here, a sign that generally prefers its leisure lit and witnessed rather than taken quietly alone. On a natal or progressed point the degree tends to show where a person restores themselves in company, and its fair test is whether the lanterns are lit for joy itself or only against the dark of the working week.

An older companion picture belongs to this degree. Charubel, the working name of the Welsh minister John Thomas, published a symbol for every zodiac degree in 1898, and for Leo 12 he described a sailing ship on a calm sea, sails all unreefed, the masts decorated with a profusion of bunting. The atlas's transcription notes that one word of the original image is not fully legible, a small honesty worth preserving. The scene is Leo in maritime dress: a vessel showing everything it has, canvas spread and flags flying, on water calm enough to make the display safe. Nothing in the picture is working hard, and that is its meaning, confidence exhibited in fair weather, magnificence that has not yet been tested by wind.

The habit of degree meanings is ancient. Vettius Valens gave each sign three ten degree faces under planetary rulers in the second century, and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos preserved the unequal Egyptian bounds; neither pictured a degree, and the first complete picture set survives in Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum of 1494. By this degree Leo has passed into its second decan under Jupiter's face, with Saturn holding the Egyptian term from twelve to eighteen, expansion above and ballast below, which reads aptly against a ship carrying all the sail it owns. Astrologers use such images where a natal placement or progression falls, treating them as a tone for the degree, and the fair weather warning writes itself.