This article is my second attempt at exploring the Aquarius/Leo axis as we transition from the Piscean Age to the Aquarian Age (click here for Part 1). Please remember that this is a very long transition, one that we may not see the end of in our lifetimes. But its signs are sprouting all around us, and it would be good for each of us to reflect on this paradigm shift because each of us is the seed and the soil from which further changes will take root. In the first article, I shared the darker side of Aquarius with its strong emphasis on technology. At the same time, Leo, as its opposite complementary, asked: What is at the heart of the matter?
Before moving further, I invite you to consider the astrological signs as REALMS OF EXPERIENCE, not as a Rorschach test for personalities. As mentioned in the previous article, this is just a thin sliver of the Aquarian and the Leo realms. I intend to expose a thread as an invitation to you to entertain these questions and see how they may be showing up in your life.
Aquarius and the experience of not being from a place
Perhaps because I have Chiron in my 11th house (a house linked to Aquarius and Chiron representing the core wound and also medicine), or because I’m an immigrant, I have always found myself attuned to the razor’s edge of either belonging or feeling like an outsider – a threshold dweller, neither from here or there.
The archetypal journey of an immigrant has many tributaries. Still, one of its core themes is how one leaves a culture, a group, or even a clan and has to make a life for oneself within another foreign culture, either struggling to fit in or trying their hardest not to lose what they were. This archetypal journey doesn’t always take the shape of someone coming from literally another country. It’s also reflected in the stories of moves from small towns to big cities, from leaving one’s station in life to marry into another family with its differences, down to being the ‘black sheep’ within one’s own family due to personality, biological makeup, and education, to name a few.
The etymology of the word immigrant from the 1620s – the age of the great sea journeys and the en masse colonization endeavor of the Americas, accounting for those who willingly came, those who were forced to come, and those who had their lands taken away – means ‘to remove, go into, move in,’ being that the keyword is ‘move’ to a place (i.e., country) where one is not a native. The word emigrate from the 1640s reflects the ‘removal from one place,’ and ‘move away.’
There’s no immigrant without the verb emigrate, for there has to be removal from one place so that a move to another can occur. This journey from removal to move is also a psychological shift that we often do in our lives. Any change or transformation creates the rip from one state, its removal, to the move into another state. No wonder when we make changes in our lives, we often feel like a foreigner in our own lives until we familiarize ourselves with the new psychological environment.
Either way, emigrating and immigrating reflect the experience of TO MOVE away from and to another place. We leave a place where we may or may not feel we belong for various reasons. The choice to do so has varying degrees of trauma, often linked to the archetype of Aquarius and the planet Uranus, with its fast lighting and out-of-the-blue experiences. Even the myth associated with the constellation of Aquarius is the story of the beautiful human boy Ganymede, son of a Trojan king, whom Zeus abducted in one of his favorite forms, an eagle. Zeus found Ganymede a figure of such perfect beauty that he wanted to take him to be his lover, thus taking him to Mount Olympus to be cupbearer to the gods and giving him immortality. While that may taken as a divine promotion, one must also wonder how Ganymede felt to be carried off to the heavens and forever removed from his homeland to become the lover of a god and cupbearer. Within the very myth of Aquarius, there’s the seed of being different (the extraordinary beauty of Ganymede set him apart from other humans) and removed (abducted) from one’s place to be moved into another realm (no longer the Trojan court, but Mount Olympus), giving the Waterbearer’s realm the signature of the first immigrant.
I share this because, in a world that is ever more ‘global’ and interconnected, we’re ever more exposed to the experience of not being ‘native’ to a place. And if you think of the United States as a ‘melting pot’ of transplants from other places and cultures, it’s good to know that in its birth chart, the Moon, representing the people in the chart of a country, is in Aquarius. It is no wonder we’re a nation of ‘Ganymedes’ removed – willing or not – from our places to serve in the great American project as cupbearers.
Genius, visionary & outcast
As the second-to-last sign of the zodiac, Aquarius is a realm of experience that teaches us to be on the threshold of change, see beyond the boundaries of the known, and take flight toward unknown worlds. Think of the voyagers in the 1600s, facing dangerous seas and their fears of the desire to explore and conquer new worlds. The next best thing we have now is the technological wizards dreaming up new cyber worlds while others dream of conquering Mars.
Aquarius leaves the Capricorn courts with their power hierarchies and established traditions to break through into the unknown. This gumption may be powered by genius and vision but also by the outcast who wants to build something of their own and in their vision. Think of the Puritans and their project of making their “City upon a Hill” in the wilds of the New World. (Mars colony, anyone?)
Also, think about the very American Revolution, a word deeply linked to Aquarius/Uranus, and its vision of building something that, until then, no other country had created: a Democratic Republic. The vision of this endeavor is what we’re now wrestling to maintain and evolve beyond the parameters that have held it thus far. From outcasts of a larger empire, early Americans moved from feeling “British” to embracing a new identity as “Americans.” It’s no wonder Hollywood, the dream machine of our collective, continues to turn up movies about evil empires being destroyed by brave, independent, visionary rebels, from Star Wars to the Avengers.
Behind some great American heroes/heroines lie stories of humans who saw beyond their current horizons and were often treated as outcasts but whose fixed determination gave birth to new ideas. This fixed quality is often missed when we think of Aquarius, but it’s central to its power and shadow. This perseverance on a fixed idea can lead to greatness, but often at a high cost to the mere humans around or those that don’t subscribe to the ideal vision propagated by the Aquarian vision. Join or be crushed is oft too real when Aquarius moves into the realm of utopia and groupthink. This is one of its darker shadows.
But when we’ve exhausted ourselves through the repetition of outworn ideas that have passed their sell-by-date, Aquarius’s electric, out-of-the-blue genius will move us toward a new paradigm, giving us enough fuel to launch ourselves beyond the prison of our fears.
The Dark Shadow of Leo
What we suppress, repress, and avoid tends to return and be made known in ways that often cause disruption, like a cosmic temper tantrum to catch our awareness. Aquarius is also associated with the citizen in their commonality – the ‘everyman.’ It speaks to the realm of the individual but within the containment of the group. The key element here is being an individual part of the group. One isn’t more special than the other, for the group has the power to do things that one individual wouldn’t be able to do.
Leo’s realm is how we experience the specialness of being singularly unique – heroes in our own adventure of becoming fully self-expressive. In Leo, we’re sovereigns of our lives, not common citizens within a larger group. The Sun rules Leo and is in detriment in Aquarius. However, if we don’t know who we are and have a sense of appreciation for our individuality, it’s harder to be a true contributor within the group. It’s easier to be swept away by the centrifugal force of the group and become washed by the mob mentality in its more challenging manifestation. At its healthiest expression, Leo and Aquarius work together, where knowing who we are and what we have to gift makes us stronger nodes within the fabric of our communities.
However, the key ingredient here is not to be too attached to how we see our identities and ‘special uniqueness.’ As both Leo and Aquarius are fixed in their mode of operation (modalities), it’s very easy to get stuck in a point of view that things have to be a certain way, thus undermining the whole idea and gift of being able to join forces as a group, and ultimately locking ourselves in a battle of wills and egos.
One way we’re seeing this shadow aspect running rampant in our culture now is around the ever-detailed subdivision of individuals and their identities and how this leads to ever more complex group associations and expressions. At its best, individuals find connection and a sense of belonging, but at its worst, it’s pitching group against group, pulverizing connection, and creating a culture of ‘Us vs. Them.’ We’re mistaking the trees for the forest, getting lost in the preciousness of our uniqueness, unable to have it serve for the greater good.
I see this as a negative manifestation of Leo in surreptitiously inserting our need to be acknowledged as individuals when the pressures of becoming anonymous within the group are also a shadow aspect of Aquarius. The seesaw of the Waterbearer and Leo is out of balance, thus recreating the Tower of Babel in our society.
Individuation and the Aquarius-Leo Axis
Individuation, a term coined by C.G. Jung, is a process where one develops one’s self out of the undifferentiated unconscious, thus allowing one to separate one’s self-identity from others. This is both a goal and a lifelong process and an essential component in developing a healthy sense of self and relationships.
In short, our evolution and development as expressions of creation is to dance between individual expressions – the node – and how we fit into the larger network of other nodes. Without nodes, there is no network, so we must understand the type of node that we are within our network. To close ourselves off, not get to know who we are, and to take our own heroic journey of self-discovery is to be a disservice to ourselves and the fabric of the whole we belong to.
Individualism is an imbalance, as the suffix -ism should be a warning. But individuation is how we honor the Leo realm in us: self-knowledge that leads to self-expression and the Aquarius realm that needs our unique gift and contribution to help the whole. Perhaps what we’re witnessing in our culture with its social media celebrities, the adulation of personalities and overemphasis on what ‘makes one special’ is an earlier stage of development towards a more mature understanding how self and group are interdependent, moving away from needing to be subjected to groupthink and ideology, but being able to flow between honoring self and also the group, in a more balanced seesaw in the axis of Aquarius-Leo as we emigrate into the Aquarian Age.
Photo Credits:
Main image: Jigar Panchal – via Unsplash
Subsequent images: Sebastian Sveson, Anil Kumar, and Milad Fakurian via Unsplash
