Moon enters Leo

When the Moon enters Leo, the part of a person that reacts before it thinks takes on the manner of a fire sign that wants to shine. The Moon holds a sign for two or three days, so this passage is brief. It shows mostly as a shift of mood that people tend to recognise only afterwards, and the colour changes again as the Moon moves into the next sign.

The Moon stands for feeling and the instinctive reply to what happens: the sense of being at home and at ease with oneself, and routines practised so long they need no thought. It shines only by the Sun's light, which it collects and hands on, and it marks change, waxing and waning. Its reactions can work unwatched, yet with steady effort any of them can be made conscious.

Leo is fire, fixed and positive, and the Sun rules it. Where Aries is still reaching for an identity, Leo already stands in one. Its warmth and loyalty last, and so do its pride, its flair for drama and its hunger to be admired. At its most mature it is like the Sun or a king, giving out a warmth others can live by. Its usual failing is arrogance.

As a fixed sign, Leo holds a planet to a steady, persistent output aimed at the self, so a planet there runs into trouble where its self-regard is touched. With the Moon in Leo, the need for security becomes a need to be seen. Feeling runs warm, generous and openly expressed, with some theatre in it, and loyalty comes easily. The same pull makes comfort depend on recognition: Leo asks little else of others, but asks it intensely, so withholding approval is enough to steer it, and being steered that way wounds it. Tempers can flare quickly and then pass without a grudge.

When the Moon is steady, what it senses is reliable, though it may resist words; when it is unsettled, the same faculty clouds the view. In Leo, the useful question is whether hurt pride is doing the seeing, and where approval is being sought or kept from others.

In the kabbalistic line the Moon stands at Yesod, the foundation, and Astrocábala makes it the home of the emotions. Leo's letter is Tet and its faculty is hearing. One kabbalistic reading takes real listening as grasping another's difficulty and sharing its weight, and holds that listening of that quality sorts truth from falsehood and keeps one humble. With the Moon in Leo, that faculty asks a warm heart to listen as generously as it hopes to be heard.