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Leo 17: The Wild Boar

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Leo 17: The Wild Boar

Charubel's image for the seventeenth degree of Leo is simply a wild boar. John Thomas, the Welsh astrologer who published under that name in 1898, gave every zodiac degree its own symbol, many of them animals presented without commentary, and the boar carries its meanings on its back. In the old European bestiary the boar is the most dangerous game in the forest, courage without calculation, the charge that does not swerve; myth remembers it as the beast that killed Adonis and ravaged Calydon.

Set into the Sun's sign the image reads as Leo's vitality in its untamed register, ferocity that defends its ground magnificently and cannot easily be governed, strength that is an asset exactly as far as something worthy stands in its path. It contrasts sharply with the disciplined communal picture the 1925 set gives this degree, and the contrast is instructive rather than a contradiction, two catalogues reading the same degree at different depths of the self.

The practice both belong to is ancient: Vettius Valens assigned planetary faces to each ten degrees in the second century, Ptolemy preserved the unequal Egyptian bounds, and the first complete degree picture set survives in Johannes Angelus's 1494 Astrolabium Planum. This degree remains in Leo's second decan under Jupiter's face with Saturn holding the term, appetite and check in one span. Where a natal placement or progression falls here, the boar is read as temperament, energy needing a cause commensurate with its force.

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