Leo 17

A church choir, unpaid and unprofessional, sings hymns together, voices joined not for wages or acclaim but out of shared devotion to something larger than any one singer. Jupiter continues to rule the decan and Saturn the term, generosity and discipline meeting again in an activity that requires both, since a choir needs both warmth of feeling and the structure of rehearsed, coordinated singing to work at all.

Jones took this from Wheeler in Balboa Park in 1925; the reading on this page is Rudhyar's 1973 wording, and togetherness there names the actual mechanism, voices that individually might be unremarkable becoming, combined, something neither singer could produce alone. The shadow, where it exists, is conformity mistaken for devotion, a voice blended so completely into the group that it stops being distinguishable at all, belonging purchased at the price of any individual note. Leo's usual insistence on being heard as itself sits in some tension with a choir's whole discipline, which is to blend rather than to stand out, making this one of the degrees where the sign is asked to practice a kind of self-effacement it does not naturally favor. Consulted at a placement, the degree tends to mark gifts that only appear in ensemble, and its counsel is that blending, freely chosen, is its own kind of solo.

Charubel's image for the seventeenth degree of Leo is simply a wild boar. John Thomas, the Welsh astrologer who published under that name in 1898, gave every zodiac degree its own symbol, many of them animals presented without commentary, and the boar carries its meanings on its back. In the old European bestiary the boar is the most dangerous game in the forest, courage without calculation, the charge that does not swerve; myth remembers it as the beast that killed Adonis and ravaged Calydon.

Set into the Sun's sign the image reads as Leo's vitality in its untamed register, ferocity that defends its ground magnificently and cannot easily be governed, strength that is an asset exactly as far as something worthy stands in its path. It contrasts sharply with the disciplined communal picture the 1925 set gives this degree, and the contrast is instructive rather than a contradiction, two catalogues reading the same degree at different depths of the self.

The practice both belong to is ancient: Vettius Valens assigned planetary faces to each ten degrees in the second century, Ptolemy preserved the unequal Egyptian bounds, and the first complete degree picture set survives in Johannes Angelus's 1494 Astrolabium Planum. This degree remains in Leo's second decan under Jupiter's face with Saturn holding the term, appetite and check in one span. Where a natal placement or progression falls here, the boar is read as temperament, energy needing a cause commensurate with its force.