Leo Rising in Astrology: Wearing the Mask of the King
One of the problems with archetypes is that they tend to get lost in time without anyone realizing it. You think that you know what the Warrior is until you realize that the image that immediately comes to mind is a dude carrying a sword, and the only place you’re going to meet that warrior is in a fantasy movie or renaissance faire.
Another archetype that hasn’t updated well to the modern world is the King. There are very few actual kings in the world, and heads of state can get along quite well without channeling the King archetype. In fact, since the 18th century, channeling the King archetype has been increasingly a liability for leaders.
With no one alive today personifying the King in a healthy way, the archetype of the King has gotten lost in costume dramas that forget what kingship is more with each passing year.
One of Leo’s archetypes is the King, and the loss of the King archetype creates a problem for people who have a strong Leo in their birth charts. Astrologers used to hope for a strong Leo in their monarchs. Today, hoping for leaders with a strong Leo is just as laughable as hoping for a strong king.
Stereotypically, Leo is seen as pompous, self-aggrandizing, attention-seeking, people-pleasing, and insecure. That is not what the King is, and it is not what Leo is supposed to be.
The King is due for a rebranding (preferably, a gender-neutral one!), but getting rid of what the King represents entirely would be a loss for everyone. Fortunately, there are clues to what the King should be buried like fossils in the birth chart and in ancient texts from the age of kings.
In this essay, I am focusing on the Leo ascendant and its relationship with the earth signs. (Another name for the King is the “earthly ruler,” after all.) But if you have other Leo placements, stick with me. What I have to say still applies to you.
Does a “good king” really exist?
In modern times, we usually think of a king as someone who takes. The king wears the finest clothes, has unspeakable wealth, and eats the finest cuts of meat. When there isn’t enough for everyone, the rest of the kingdom suffers to support the king’s extravagance because an extravagant king is a sign of a prosperous country, even if everyone else is living in squalor.
While it’s true that kings have always lived in luxury, simply being the person with the most stuff didn’t make someone a king in the age of kings. In medieval Northern European societies, a common epithet for the king was the “ring-giver” because the king’s generosity earned the devotion of his followers. It was dragons, not kings, who hoarded wealth. Good kings gave it away. Generosity was a sign of power, and it was also a virtue.
The connection between generosity and kingly esteem was not exclusively a European value. Lewis Hyde finds similar patterns in people groups all over the world. It seems that it is a common human truth that power isn’t found in how much you have but in how much you give away.
So, if we are going to look for the King in Leo. We need to start by looking for generosity.
A good king uses their wealth to serve.
When you think about kings and wealth, you probably think of fancy clothes, a heavy banquet table, and all kinds of status symbols designed to remind everyone that the king is wealthy.
That might be what it means to be influential today, but that’s not the picture astrology paints of how a king uses their wealth well.
If you have Leo rising, you have Virgo in the second house. Virgo’s virtue is the pursuit of perfection. In the second house, this means that Virgo’s drive to do better and better is directed toward money. Virgo is also the sign of the servant, which means that someone with Virgo in the second house uses that drive to perfect their relationship with money to serve others.
If you have the ascendant in Leo, you are constantly perfecting your relationship with your resources because you can’t be generous if you have nothing to give. In societies where kingship was connected with gift-giving, no one wanted a poor king. It was the king’s obligation to get very good at acquiring wealth so that he could give that wealth away. If the king prospered, the people prospered.
For someone with Leo rising/Virgo in the second house, embodying this aspect of the King doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to learn to become rich. You could become a philanthropist, but you also embody this virtue when you learn to live on less, so you can afford to be of service. Maybe, you spend less time working, so you can afford to volunteer at a nursing home. Or, maybe, you dedicate a lot of time and energy to perfecting a skill that is then used in service to the community.
A good king isn’t just a pretty face with a lot of servants.
If you have a Leo ascendant, you have Capricorn in the sixth house. Steven Forrest says in The Inner Sky that Capricorn is “the marriage of one’s nature and one’s public identity.” There are some similarities to the sixth house and Virgo, so once again we come to the idea of service.
Traditionally, the sixth house tells you something about your servants. In popular models of kingship, the King is a charismatic figurehead leader who needs a boring but practical prime minister behind the scenes to deal with the unglamorous paperwork and number crunching.
In modern times, most of us don’t have servants, and the sixth house is the House of Day Jobs. This means that the sixth house tells us something about the day job of the King.
In the modern view of the sixth house, it is the job of the day job of the King to do the work of the Prime Minister. No handing the job off to a schmuck who does all the work while you get the glory. A person who wants to have a healthy Leo ascendant needs to develop the Capricorn-ish ability to make the trains run on time, and they need to use this ability in service to the community.
A good king creates safety and security for the community.
If you have a Leo ascendant, you have Taurus in the tenth house. The tenth house is called the House of Career traditionally. Since most of us think of our sixth house day jobs as our careers, the difference between the tenth house and the sixth house needs some explaining.
The sixth house is what you do to be of service. It’s often the thing people pay you money for.
The tenth house is the thing you feel called to do, the role you feel called to play in the community, the archetype you should represent to people who don’t know you well.
Often, your 10th house role is unpaid. You might might really strongly identify with your political party but not work in politics, or you might be a musician who needs to sell life insurance to pay the rent.
For someone with Leo rising and Taurus in the tenth house, their role is tied to Taurean things. Taurus is associated with the second house in modern astrology, which returns us to the idea of money. Taurus is not just about accumulating resources, however. Taurus is about developing inner security. Outer security can contribute to a sense of inner security, but we can all name people who have a lot of material resources and are deeply insecure.
This means that for someone embodying the King with Leo rising, the thing they are called to embody for the community is a sense of security. Once again, we return to the king as ‘ring-giver,” but there is more to it than that. The King’s role in the community is to represent safety, to develop inner security and then lead others in developing that security for themselves.
There were dim embers of this dying flame still burning in the early days of the French Revolution. Despite the decadence at court, the peasants in the countryside had a deep faith in the king. They believed that the famines and high taxes were caused by the king’s greedy advisors.
“If only the king knew about this,” they said. “He would fix everything.”
The idea of the King gave the peasants such a deep sense of security that they were willing to ignore real poverty for years before they revolted.
What is a healthy Leo ascendant in a world without kings?
The picture I’ve painted of the King couldn’t be further from the stereotypes that surround Leo. The King is generous. Leo is a spendthrift. The King’s security is contagious. Leo is deeply insecure. The King serves. Leo is served.
How did this happen? Because the fall of the King archetype became the fall of Leo. When it was no longer possible to imagine a king that is a benefit to society, it became difficult to imagine a healthy expression of Leo, too, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Look at a chart with Leo rising, and you’ll see that the earth signs create a triangle with the base at the bottom of the chart, parallel the horizon. The triangle is the most solid, secure shape. Service is the foundation of the Leo rising triangle (i.e. 2nd house Virgo and 6th house Capricorn). That foundation creates the strength necessary for that deep sense of security to rise to the heights in the Taurus 10th house.
Service isn’t just about clocking hours. It comes from the deep knowledge that you have something to give.
We are living in a moment when believing that you have something to give is the height of arrogance. People who win awards are expected to say, “Well, it wasn’t really me that did this. It was really all of these other people.” This is supposed to make up for centuries of the rich and powerful getting the credit for the work of armies of invisible peasants, but vague modesty doesn’t really solve the abuse of power problem, and it creates a terrible situation for Leo.
It is often said that narcissists (one of the potential shadow faces of Leo) feel insecure because they feel like Nobody, and they need the constant reflection of themselves from other people to reassure them that they exist. (This is called narcissistic supply.) Leo falls into pit of feeling like Nobody when it thinks it has nothing to give.
A healthy Leo finds the foundation of their identity in generosity and service. They feel like themselves when they’re giving things away. The more valuable their gifts, the more valuable they feel. When a Leo is pressured to believe that having something to give is the height of arrogance, they they don’t become humble. They fall into narcissism.
Practical Advice for Leo Ascendants
There’s a saying in the evolutionary astrology circles that the cure for a dysfunctional sign is in the sign that comes after it in the zodiac wheel and the sign opposite it. For Leo, that’s Virgo and Aquarius. From Virgo, Leo learns how to serve. From Aquarius, Leo learns how to be itself without carrying what anyone else thinks.
But what does that mean practically?
1. Engage in acts of service. Perfect your ability to be service and really shine it up into something valuable. Virgo doesn’t just need to feel helpful. It needs to be helpful. Virgo’s grounded, pragmatic earth energy helps Leo tell the difference between the two.
2. Be proud of being generous. Encouraging Leo to feel pride might sound like encouraging narcissism, but it isn’t. Narcissistic supply “reassures” Leo that they’re valuable in vague ways, but it doesn’t actually give the sense of self-worth the Leo is seeking. That is why they are always hungry for validation. Narcissistic supply is a cheap substitute for the legitimate and worthy satisfaction that comes from being generous and creating security for others, which is the core of the Leo identity. The “pride” of narcissism is like living on Cheetos for Leo. The cure is the genuine pride of knowing you’re being of service.
3. Find a grateful community. The pride that comes from legitimately being of service is a vitamin that Leo needs. In a normally functioning society, gratitude is the natural reward for giving. Gratitude holds up a mirror and shows a genuinely positive image of the person who gives, encouraging them to continue doing good work. When society enforces false modesty, acts of generosity and service become invisible, along with the person who did them. The falsely humble picture Leo sees reflected back to them is a like that saps their sense of self-worth. It creates the sense that “no matter what I give, it isn’t enough,” and the desperately starving Leo turns to narcissistic snack food to get their needs met.
4. Celebrate your own generosity. Some people have a practice of writing down all of the things they’re grateful for every day. Someone with a lot of Leo in their chart would benefit from turning that practice on its head. Every night, celebrate genuine acts of generosity. Make a list of the things you did to help other people, the ways in which you were of service, the way you made people’s lives better for being around. You will know this exercise is working because you will feel like a plant in the sun, as if you can live on the glow you get thinking about the way you’ve made people’s lives better.
The feeling of satisfaction in genuine service is as far from narcissism as Earth is from the sun.
Leo Risings Guide to World Domination
Leo Risings Guide to World Domination is a companion on the road to figuring out what this moment is asking of you, written with Leo ascendant people in mind.
It gives you tools to find meaning for yourself and write your own story. And maybe, by seizing control of the narrative, you’ll even take over the world.
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