Esoteric Astrology

Most people learn the planet glyphs the way they learn road signs: this squiggle is Mars, that one is Saturn, move on. Leo thinks that misses the point. In his view the symbols were built on purpose, and they carried their inner meaning safely through the dark ages of materialism while almost nobody could read it.

Every planetary glyph is assembled from three marks: the circle, the semicircle and the cross. Alone or stacked in different orders, they spell out the whole set.

Each mark stands for one layer of a person. The circle is Spirit, the semicircle is Soul, the cross is Body. So a glyph is really a short sentence about how spirit, soul and matter are arranged in that planet's kind of influence.

Start with the bare circle. Leo gives it the largest meaning in the book: the unity beneath everything, present in matter as much as in spirit, in what we call evil as much as in good.

Then he admits a problem. Something with no limits in space or time cannot honestly have a symbol at all, and even an empty circle has a circumference, which hints at a boundary. The circle is simply the least misleading shape available, and the human mind insists on something to look at.

In the language of numbers it is nought; in light, darkness; in sound, silence. Inside astrology it means Spirit not yet individualised: abstract life that has not become anyone yet, and that gains self-consciousness only by accepting limits and entering into combination.

Now put a point in the centre. For Leo this is the moment something comes out of the incomprehensible No-thing. Light begins to shine in the darkness, sound rises in the silence, and nought becomes One.

Applied to our solar system, the dotted circle is the Solar Logos, the one God of the system, and in astrology it is the Sun. He means this quite literally. The whole system is that Being's body, the planets are organs within it, and the Sun is the heart, sending vital force out to every globe like blood through a human body.

In a person the same glyph stands for the individual self: life and consciousness gathered to a centre. The empty circle is spirit everywhere. The point gives it a centre, and a centre is where a self begins.

In Leo's reading, what changes when a point is placed in the centre of the circle?

• Unity is lost, because any centre divides the circle into separate parts
• The hidden One becomes manifest, as the Sun and the individual self✓Correct answer
• The circle stops meaning Spirit and comes to mean the physical Earth
• Spirit splits into two poles, soul and body, held in balance

The point marks Being coming out of Non-being: the One made manifest, which astrology writes as the Sun and a person carries as the individual self. Splitting into two poles belongs to the next figure, the circle cut by a line.

Draw a line across the circle and it becomes two halves that still belong to one shape. Leo reads this as duality with unity underneath: Self and Not-self, the world within and the world without, not yet torn apart.

That in-between state is the Soul, standing between Spirit above and Body below. Take just half the circle and you have the crescent, the Moon, waxing and waning. It stands for the personal soul with its moods, which can rise and become one with spirit, or sink and be bound to the body.

He reads the lunar phases the same way. New Moon, when Moon and Sun meet, is soul united with spirit. Full Moon is the personality lit by the Sun and throwing that borrowed light down onto ordinary physical consciousness.

Add a second line at right angles and you have a cross inside a circle. Any astrologer knows the shape: it is the ground plan of the chart, the horizon running from ascendant to descendant, the meridian from zenith to nadir. Astronomers use the same figure for the Earth.

Leo's point is that this figure means incessant activity. The four quarters exist only because Self and Not-self keep acting on each other. Stop the action and reaction and the quadrants vanish, leaving two quiet halves again. Set the cross whirling and you get the old svastika, force spiralling through matter.

In a person the cross is Body, the material self. And when the circle is dropped and only the bare cross remains, the spiritual origin is forgotten and only force working in matter is left.