Leo opens with the Sun's own fixed fire taking over from Cancer's cardinal water, and though the sign belongs wholly to the Sun, its first decan in the Chaldean face order goes to Saturn, while the Egyptian term for the first six degrees belongs to Jupiter, a fire sign's opening moment run, oddly, by neither of its own natural allies. The image is physical and immediate: a man's blood visibly rushes to his head as ambition mobilizes his whole vital system at once, the body registering a psychological spur as a literal, measurable surge.
Wheeler gave Jones this picture in their single 1925 sitting in Balboa Park; the reading attached here is Rudhyar's 1973 language, more clinical in its vocabulary than most of his glosses and closer, on this one degree, to the kind of precise physiological attention Jones himself favored in his 1953 book. The shadow needs no invention, since a rush of blood to the head is itself the common idiom for anger or overreach getting the better of judgment, ambition that has physically outrun the capacity to think clearly about it. Leo's whole nature is a claim to vital, self-directed energy, so opening the sign with blood answering a spur before the mind has fully weighed in reads as the sign's own governing impulse, caught in the instant before it becomes deliberate.