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Leo 7: The Brilliant Constellations

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Leo 7: The Brilliant Constellations

The night sky itself is the image here, stars gathered into constellations and shining with a brightness the description insists on rather than leaves to be assumed, an entire degree given over to looking up rather than at any human scene. Saturn's decan and the newly begun Venus term, degrees seven through eleven, put the coldest and the warmest of the classical planets in charge of the same picture, distance and beauty read together rather than as opposites.

Wheeler produced this vision in the 1925 Balboa Park session; the reading carried here is Rudhyar's 1973 language, and it is a degree where his more mythic, psychological vocabulary, archetype specifically, sits comfortably, treating the fixed pattern of the constellations as a picture of what does not change in human nature even as everything else does. There is little shadow offered for a sky simply doing what a clear night sky does, though permanence this total can also read as remoteness, brilliance too far away to warm anyone standing under it. Leo's own light, the Sun's, is notably absent from a scene about the night sky, the fire sign here made to look up rather than to shine, admiring a brightness that is not its own.

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