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Leo 17: The Volunteer Church Choir

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Leo 17: The Volunteer Church Choir

A church choir, unpaid and unprofessional, sings hymns together, voices joined not for wages or acclaim but out of shared devotion to something larger than any one singer. Jupiter continues to rule the decan and Saturn the term, generosity and discipline meeting again in an activity that requires both, since a choir needs both warmth of feeling and the structure of rehearsed, coordinated singing to work at all.

Jones took this from Wheeler in Balboa Park in 1925; the reading on this page is Rudhyar's 1973 wording, and togetherness there names the actual mechanism, voices that individually might be unremarkable becoming, combined, something neither singer could produce alone. The shadow, where it exists, is conformity mistaken for devotion, a voice blended so completely into the group that it stops being distinguishable at all, belonging purchased at the price of any individual note. Leo's usual insistence on being heard as itself sits in some tension with a choir's whole discipline, which is to blend rather than to stand out, making this one of the degrees where the sign is asked to practice a kind of self-effacement it does not naturally favor. Consulted at a placement, the degree tends to mark gifts that only appear in ensemble, and its counsel is that blending, freely chosen, is its own kind of solo.

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