Leo’s celebratory spirit permeates the skies each year when the Sun returns to its home sign. Lion-sized levels of courage, creativity and generosity abound in this realm of fixed fire. In 2024, the Leo Sun’s warmth and vitality will be boosted by ever-ready Mars and expansive Jupiter in friendly Gemini. In fact, those two will conjoin on August 14th. The Leo Gemini combination tends to lighten the atmosphere and present plenty of opportunities for social engagement and fun. Gemini is the mutable air sign. Presently Saturn and Neptune are in Pisces, the mutable water sign, and during the Leo Sun cycle Mercury and Venus will move into Virgo, the mutable earth sign. This celestial emphasis on the mutable qualities of flexibility, adaptability and gentle release will prove beneficial during the upcoming solar cycle and throughout the remainder of 2024. For example, in the near term the
Immediately following its ingress into regal Leo, the Sun will face an opposition from transforming Pluto under a fixed Aquarius Moon on July 22nd. Squares from chaotic Uranus will bookend and occur throughout the Leo Sun cycle. They include three to Mercury, on July 21st, August 18th and September 6th, one to Venus on August 2nd, and one to the Sun on August 19th, under a potent, fixed sign full Moon. Uranus represents evolution, but Taurus, like Leo and Aquarius, is a fixed sign and can be resistant to change. The three innovating squares to the Messenger planet, before, during and after its forthcoming retrograde, are especially significant. They suggest that new, original ways of solving seemingly intractable problems are emerging and that it’s time to leave
Mercury crossed into the shadow zone of its forthcoming retrograde on July 16th, at 21° Leo 25′, and it will not exit the outbound shadow point of 4° Virgo 06′ until September 11th. The retrograde itself runs from August 4th-28th. Note: the retrograde officially starts at 12:56 A.M. EST on the 5th, which means an August 4th onset for time zones west of EST. On September 1st Pluto will retrograde back into Capricorn, for the final time in over two centuries. Looking ahead, Neptune will enter Aries on March 30, 2025, for the first time since 1875, and Uranus will venture into Gemini on July 7, 2025, for the first time since 1949. In short, not only are all three of the globally influential outer planets changing signs during the next year, all three are moving from yin or inward, reflecting signs to yang or outward, expressing ones. The zone of the forthcoming Mercury retrograde will touch on this wider pattern. Also, under August 19th’s fixed sign full Moon, at a considerable 27º Aquarius 15′, the first Jupiter Saturn square will reach exactitude at 17º 28′. Their second square will be exact on December 24th at 14º 01′. Because of Jupiter’s retrograde, beginning on October 9th, this mutable square will be in place, diffusing hardened positions and ideas, for nearly six months. This coalescence of the winds of change blowing exuberantly from Gemini-based-Jupiter and dissolving tidal waves from Saturn (and Neptune) in Pisces signals that one epoch is washing out as a new one is forming. This square period leads into early 2025, the year when the excitement and ingenuity of the big three in proactive signs will be uncorked. On August 15th Mars, from Gemini, will square Saturn in Pisces. This one may point to areas needing improvement or release immediately or during the larger cycles. Concurrently, informative Mercury’s dance between Leo and Virgo will have its thoughts to share. From its home sign of Virgo, Mercury’s insights can be astonishingly clear, and, partnered with innovating Uranus’s three squares, Leo-based-Mercury will be itching to crack a few codes, ones that can help usher in the paradigmatic shifts now getting underway.
