The Lion, Regulus, and the Heart of the Figure

The lion is one of the constellations whose figure has been stable for the longest time, recognised as a lion in Mesopotamia (MUL UR-GU-LA) and in Greece, where it became the Nemean lion killed by Heracles as the first of his labours. Its brightest star, Regulus, sits almost exactly on the ecliptic and was one of the four so-called royal stars of Persia, marking the seasonal quarters in an older scheme; its Arabic name Qalb al-Asad, the heart of the lion, survives in the Latin Cor Leonis. Because Regulus lies so close to the ecliptic it is frequently occulted by the Moon and passed by the planets, which gave it an outsized role in the fixed-star tradition. Precession has now carried it out of the tropical sign of Leo and into the first degree of Virgo, a shift that occurred within the last few decades and caused some comment among astrologers who use fixed stars.

Manilius reads Leo's royal character in explicitly political terms, associating the sign with command, spectacle and the temperament suited to rule, a reading that predates any connection to feline nobility as commonly understood today. The Sphinx of Giza has sometimes been proposed, on comparatively weak evidence, as an ancient marker of Leo rising at a remote astronomical epoch, an argument associated chiefly with fringe astro-archaeological speculation rather than mainstream Egyptology, and the atlas notes this only to flag it as contested rather than to endorse it.