Planets in Profile: The Moon in Leo

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology. Today we are going to continue our Planets in Profile Series; we have been most recently tracking the moon through the 12 signs, getting to know the archetypal meaning of the moon through each of the 12 signs of the zodiac.

Today, we're going to continue that series by looking at the moon in the sign of Leo. Now, one thing that I have to say is that it's a little bit unfortunate that our amazingly talented poet, Kaylee Haynes, who is the poet in residence in this series, is not able to keep up with the production schedule any longer. So she's a very busy person. And, you know, art doesn't always come quickly or easily, especially when you're on a schedule production schedule. So, unfortunately, she will not be contributing her poetry any longer. But man, did we appreciate her contribution to the first, I guess, several portions of this series, so we'll definitely miss that. But I recommend that if you haven't checked out Kaylee Haynes's work, Artemismoon, you can check her out on Instagram and continue to follow all of the great work that she does. To date, we are very thankful for her role in the series.

We'll continue with The Moon in Leo today and get to know this, and I thought it is kind of appropriate to do it while we have several planets moving through the sign of Leo right now and Venus getting ready to appear as the evening star in the sign of Leo. It's a nice time to reflect on this sign and the moon's archetypal meaning in the sign in particular; before we get into it, don't forget to like and subscribe and share your comments and reflections. We'd love to hear from you. You can find transcripts of any of these daily talks on my website, nightlight astrology.com.

Okay, well, on that note, I am going to put a presentation up on the screen that you can follow along with at home. If you have a screen, you're watching this, and if not, you can certainly find the notes and visuals of the presentation on my YouTube channel if you're listening on Spotify, Apple, or whatever. So Moon in Leo, continuing the series, it has been a real treat to visit the moons meaning through the 12 signs. The Moon in Leo, in particular, is, I think, a very queenly Moon placement that brings out the archetype of the Queen. We'll talk about that in a little bit.

In order to understand any planet in any sign, you have to start with an understanding of the nature of the planet first, so with the moon, the moon's universal significations are, in the broadest sense, those significations that philosophically get at the core of what the moon means. So, on the universal level, the moon represents the realm of fortune, the embodied material physical universe, which was thought of broadly speaking in a metaphysical sense as feminine. It is an embodied place of diversity, a diversity of life forms and beings, and a matrix and ecology of living life.

The moon represents the realm of fortune, meaning the daily fluctuation of events and the constant changing of the environment, mood, emotions, mind, body, and circumstance, rotating like a wheel. The moon similarly reflects this motion as she moves through the sky every month, sneaking twining around the ecliptic like a serpent, shedding her skin and taking on a new body all over again through the contrast of her light and dark. Now, by contrast, the moon as a topical significator will represent those things that are most specific concrete. So that would be things like the body, mothers, who give us our bodies, women, home and family, ancestry, tribe, village, clan, and culture.

In all lunar topics, the moon can represent marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth, as well as what we nurture or devote ourselves to as little as possible, as well as very literal things like food and cooking. The moon is sometimes associated with our emotional intelligence or the emotional side of our psychological nature. That's fair in ancient astrology; it was one of the planets used to calculate temperament along with mercury, the ascendant, the ruler of the ascendant planets in the first house. However, the calculation of temperament and emotional nature was quite complex. It was never just rooted in the moon. But the moon certainly played a role.

Now, the significations of the moon are then modified whenever you're analyzing the planet of any planet. But in this case, the moon. The significations of the moon will be modified according to the sign that the moon is traveling through at any given time or in a birth chart. The meaning of a sign is, in turn, most primarily related to the nature of its planetary host and then secondarily by the various qualities of the sign so, in the case of the moon in Leo, we can understand this placement according to the following features Leo is the masculine Temple of the Sun. It is called solid or fixed, and Yang means masculine firesign.

I use the word Yang even though it's a sort of foreign word to ancient Western astrology because When you think of the words masculine and feminine and ancient Greek philosophy, you are thinking of categories of being not just literal sex or gender categories; they are metaphysical qualities. And so one expression of that might be the way in which we think about literal sex or gender or traditional sex or gender categories, but they had much broader, vaster meanings and cosmic significance.

So, Yang is a word that we all know to mean something closer to that, which is why I use the word. Sometimes, people will mistake the word masculine for something it's not. Anyhow, so Leo is a solid Ying FIRESIGN, the Home Temple of the Sun. It is the sign of the lion. Now, as the second sign of zodiacal summer, it's important to note what's happening to the quality of light during this time of year. This is the sign that the light-dominant half of the year is now steadily waning toward the Fall Equinox, even as the light is now at its most mature, and we are also in the most Yang stable period of the year.

So what that means is that from Cancer forward, the next three signs, Cancer, Leo, and Virgo, we're still on the light half of the year from the solar standpoint of the northern hemisphere, which is where the symbolic language is oriented from. And within that movement of Cancer, Leo Virgo, the sun is now setting, so to speak, on the light half of the year, the arc of the sun is slowly dropping down, and the days are getting shorter. In Leo, we, therefore, have the quality that stabilizes the middle of summer, which is defined as the gradual waning of light in the light-dominant half of the year.

Most of the time, when we think of summer, we often think of the light's most powerful time. But it is actually the light's most powerful time, properly speaking, is Aries all the way through Gemini when the light is dominant and rising, dominant in gaining in strength, whereas from Cancer through Virgo, we've already reached the apex of the power of the light, and now it's starting to wane. So, it is more like midlife. You know, it's more like for age 40 to 60 or something like that, you're starting to move into the later years of life. There are many different age metaphors, and you can play some of the zodiacal stories, too, so don't take what I'm saying there too literally, but anyhow. So it's important to note this because so many of Leo's qualities and the reason why the sun was given rulership have to do with the sustaining of light as it is dying.

So, Leo properly represents everything that wants to sustain something that is of an eternal spiritual, transcendental, or archetypal nature, which is the nature of the sun and of light for ancient astrologers. It is reflective of divinity, eternality, and the sort of unchanging, perfect, eternal, timeless nature of the forms of the archetypes of the day, which are also the gods. Also, the soul shares in that same nature the eternal, immortal, undying, unborn soul that each of us has. So, when you are in the sign of Leo, what you're talking about is the desire to sustain those things, despite the fact that the light will die someday in terms of it being encased in matter in this material world.

So Leo, whether you think about it as the principle of monarchy and the succession of kings or queens, hands down the eternal poster principle of the king or Queen through successive people that were the crown, that is like the sustaining of the light, despite the dying. Hence, the lion is associated with kings and Leo, and the sun is associated with royalty, and so forth. But you also have anything that we aim our life at as a transcendental value and ambition, a sense of purpose, what makes us unique or special, that will live beyond the dying of our mortal body? What are you living for? The sense of having a destiny that lives in the stars and is illuminated from within by the eternal spirit soul who is here for a special reason? Heroic? If this is the sun sign? So this is something that we have to consider in a lifetime. We say, What's my purpose? What's my journey? Why am I here? These perennial questions that we ask astrologers, in a sense, because we all have a sun sign, and we're all wondering how to live for something that is of greater spiritual value to us that sort of lives beyond the fact that we die someday. This is not a nihilistic sign, right?

So, the moon in Leo can be understood as a fiery yang solar moon. This is a moon that is expressing itself through these qualities, which is why one of the strongest signatures that we get from the moon and Leo is the Queen or the matriarch, the way in which the feminine lives as a principle of eternal and enduring value, the great pride taken in the post that the moon embodies, which might be mother nurturer, healer, and some sense of royalty or regality associated with such roles.

Anyway, the moon in Leo will be reflected in many of the following characters and themes; you will see that the moon in Leo is regal. It carries a sense of being both feminine and embodied, sensual, caring, nurturing, and Royal and eternal. It's a proud and loyal moon. It is royal but sometimes self-important and tends to aggrandized its emotions, moods, and feelings; it can be queenly, but sometimes inflated, dramatic, but sometimes overly dramatic; popular, but sometimes a diva right, in a negative sense, not that there's anything wrong with being a diva, the shining example but also the theatrical, self-centered whiner. You can you can see it going either way. And sometimes it goes both ways in a day: children like the moon and Leo, and we carry that sense of childlike specialness, light, and importance. We don't really have a sense of your own death when you're a child, but neither does the full-grown moon, and Leo is honestly theatrical and nocturnal. Nocturnal is interesting here because the sun is very sunny. It's very diurnal. It's very daytime; the moon in Leo brings all of the grandness and light into the nocturnal spaces. I think of someone like Adele singing in the evening at her regular spot in Vegas, or I think about someone who is like a Leonardo nine woman who is the diva of the night.

This is a wonderful, lovely, rich moon and a moon that needs romance, power, pride, shine, specialness, importance, theatricality, royalty, and dignity, but also is usually best when nurturing others or nurturing in devotion, something that they care about that is bigger than themselves just like the sun and Leo. There is often sensitivity and a grander; you will find that Leo moons are often highly sensitive, like the feminine in all of us, which is the sensitive, receptive, careful, thoughtful, and gentle soul. But also there's a grander, there's a sense of walking quietly, but with, you know, just as much sort of regality as the lion.

It's like imagining a lioness walking proudly but quietly in the night. Tendencies towards sentimentality and pride have to be looked after. But this is a caring, loyal, sweet, and warm moon. This brings warmth into the darkness. This is maternal leadership; this is the matriarch. This is a huntress, but there are also things like wealth or power through family or inheritance. So some things to think about there. Now, I want to show you just because I think it is fun to show examples of people that we all know in the collective historical or famous people who have something of this moon quality, Queen Elizabeth the Second. I mean, you can't make this up. It's just that simple.

Moon in Leo Paris Hilton, right? The someone who has inherited a great estate and is a kind of Queen, a queen of a certain, you know, like a she's a little reminds me a little bit of like, I think now is Madonna, a Sun in Leo or a moon in Leo. I can't remember, but she has some Leo energy in her chart. It reminds me a little bit of a Madonna, a material girl living in a material world. Moon in Leo, though, for Paris Hilton. That makes sense. Marilyn Manson, though, has a moon in Leo, and if you want to think about someone who embodies the kind of dark theatrical kind of qualities, the nocturnal theatrical, a sort of romantic but moody nocturnal qualities, Marilyn Manson's moon and Leo. You know and then think about how theatrical and dramatic and costumed and so forth.

Now, there are some heavier things in his chart, too, like a fall in Saturn or Mars in Scorpio with Neptune. But I think it's interesting to note that someone's so theatrical and dark has a moon in Leo, Clint Eastwood, moon in Leo. Now, this makes a lot of sense to me because, as someone who grew up being force-fed Clint Eastwood movies by my dad, who's like a huge Clint Eastwood fan, and my grandfather, they always like the cowboy stuff and all that stuff. I'm not a huge Clint Eastwood fan or anything, but you know, I did grow up seeing probably every single spaghetti western, so they called them because they were filmed in Italy, I believe.

But anyway, Sergio Leone was the composer. I think that that was his name, like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, all this stuff. He always had a kind of sensitive, gentle, theatrical, romantic quality to him. That made him both a tough guy and a heartthrob. This is interesting, given someone who has, you know, Venus in Cancer, the moon sign, and the moon in Leo. Mars in Aries. It's kind of a traditional masculine placement of Saturn in Capricorn, right? Venus opposite Saturn, a little stoic, but also the moon in Leo, the celebrity, the star, the actor, the artist. There's a weirdly sensitive kind of gentle side to him. That was part of his appeal, I would say, and I just couldn't help but notice that the moon is in Leo in his chart.

I remember that, especially with actors and actresses, the qualities of their chart will often come through in their talents and abilities as actors and the roles that they commonly play. It's no different than the things you or I regularly do. Being reflected in our astrology doesn't mean that they are the characters they play. But it does mean that the archetypes are not somehow absent from the characters they play. Bruno Mars, I mean, I don't feel like I even have to say anything. I think it's interesting that he's got the moon square Pluto, which is opposite Jupiter and Aquarius. So you got some spacey deep kind of tangled, you know, kind of yin energy with Pluto and the kind of spacey energy with Jupiter. But he is such a moon in Leo. He has this kind of cocky romantic theatrical quality to him. That is very warm, and you know, he's even dressed like a cat in this image. He's got the cat print on his on his on his shirt. They're interesting.

I feel like Bruno Mars really embodies the moon in Leo. Now, Winston Churchill is a political leader, whether you like him or not. He had that bold, brash quality, a little theatrical and dramatic. I love this one, George Michael, to me. George Michael makes 100% sense. To me, even his hairdo in this image sort of feels like the lion. Like you, I just feel like you look at his face and you go lion so a very moon in Leo kind of character and George Michael and all of his wonderful music by the way, I would say that his role as a musical outsider, someone who was you know, in a category of musicians where LGBTQ people were starting to become more accepted in the musical industry, sort of, just to me is reflected in the moon opposite Saturn piece here as well in Aquarius.

A Jane Fonda total queen; look at that hair. I couldn't help but think that it was the woman who made these slides. It's like, you know, so funny that all of the celebrities you choose have the lion hair; they have the mane going on. She's a very Sagittarian personality Jane Fonda is, in my opinion, but that kind of queenly energy she just exudes. And someone who has been an important icon in the modern history of feminism, you might say. You know, maybe people want to debate that, but I think she makes a pretty good Moon and Leo character.

Margaret Thatcher. Just a complicated person. So you do have Saturn in Scorpio, which is quite strong in her chart. But look at that. Moon Neptune in Leo. I think the kind of idea of the Queen is apparent in her, although, you know, we might debate how much of a likable she was, Sharleen Princess of Monaco. It doesn't get more literal than that moon in Leo. Volodymyr Zelensky, I hope I said that right. Moon in Leo. But it's interesting that he's not only the president of Ukraine but also a former screenwriter, actor, and comedian. I find that interesting because he has three planets in Leo, including Mars. And there's I have so many memories of seeing him in the past few years in, like, the role of sort of military leader resistant, heroic, but kind of a theme, a theatrical quality to like, it made total sense to me. I didn't know this about him. It made total sense to me that he was an actor and a comedian as well. He just does well in the lights and the bright lights. But anyway, three planets in Leo for the President of Ukraine. That was interesting.

Anne Frank, a feminine hero, I would call her one of our greatest female heroes of the last, you know, whatever, a couple of 100 years. Everything that she did with her life, her diary, is remarkable. To me, Mars and Neptune are also important here in the sign of Leo for her, but they are present with that. I'm living for something beyond myself. Even as a little girl. How powerful was she? Queen Latifah? I mean, come on. It's a literal Queen Latifah. You know, I mean, how's that? I love that she has the moon square Mars and Saturn and Taurus because it just she's got such an earthy sensual, kind of the sort of earthy sensual goddess vibe as well as the sort of like, you know like she's, she's a queen in ancient Egypt or something. It just feels like she's got a couple of different things that add to that feeling of being a very powerful woman. You know, she's got the full deck of cards when it comes to the moon and Leo energy; she's got other things that kind of, I think, amplify it. Venus in Aries, Jupiter, squaring the moon from Scorpio, stuff like that.

But Queen Latifah, I think she's got that big regal lioness personality. James Brown also right? I think I love the way he's saying he's got Mercury and Uranus in Aries together because that feels spot on. But I love that he had the moon in Leo. I mean, he just grabbed that spotlight and had this kind of nocturnal theatrical grandness that matched the way that he was as an artist. Steve Harvey, the same thing, got several planets in Leo, but the moon in Leo in particular. He is really charming and sensitive, but he also has a very grand and theatrical personality. You know, I'm not trying to say you ought to like all these people or whatever. It's just, you know, observations.

Carlos Santana, same thing, three planets in Leo. I think his guitar playing, you can look and say, well, he's got mercury, and he's got Mars and Uranus together in Mercury sign, and he's got a Venus-Mercury conjunction. Oh, I mean, just articulate and fast with his musical skills and his hands and the way he plays his instrument. But also that just look at him. He looks like a lion. He's got the main flowing gold guitar, you know. A queen of the night. And I mean that you know, like, I think that anyone, regardless of gender, should feel ennobled by that title, The Queen of the Night.

Nancy Reagan, of course, this may be possible, but if this chart is not, I don't remember the rating offhand. It could be that the moon is in Cancer, but we're taking it at face value. The moon in Leo makes a lot of sense. Now I would feel like, yeah, just like she was a first lady. So it's a queen. A bunch of planets in Cancer for her with the moon in Leo also modifies every Cancerian planet, making it a little touch more Lea nine. So that's fascinating.

On that note, let me just look at my presentation here. That concludes what I have on my list. These are just some interesting individuals that I feel can help us imagine our way to the moon in Leo's territory. If nothing else, I feel like those examples. When I just sit with them for a second, I look at their pictures and think about their personalities. It's just like I see the moon and Leo going right across their image, you know, and it helps me to look at things that way when I'm getting to know archetypes.

So, even if I don't know all of the details of these people's lives. There are ways in which anyone who's seen their public work as artists or actors or historical figures can just see the qualities of the planet on display. So I hope you find that useful. I will end here today for our moon in Leo discussion. A beautiful sign, the Queen of Night; be careful of it being a touch theatrical or self-important. However, the romance and the sense of a proud mother who will nurture and take you in with her light are also a big part of Leo's appeal to the moon.

So for all of you out there who have it, I also hope you feel honored which all Leos love to feel. Bye, bye this presentation. And I hope you're having a good day. We will continue with the Moon in Virgo soon enough. So take it easy. We'll see you again soon. Bye.