Leo 20: The Zuni Sun Ritual

Zuni people perform a ceremony directed to the sun, a specific, named Pueblo nation credited by name rather than left as a generic stand-in for indigenous life, which distinguishes this image somewhat from a few of the more anonymized ethnographic scenes elsewhere in the 360. Wheeler produced the vision in the 1925 Balboa Park session; this article does not describe the ceremony's actual content, since Pueblo religious practice is frequently closed to outsiders and neither Wheeler's brief image nor anything available here establishes what, if anything, she or Jones actually knew about Zuni ritual specifically, beyond the general fact that sun ceremonies are part of a living, ongoing tradition rather than a historical relic.

Jupiter rules the decan through this final degree and Mars now holds the term; the reading on this page is Rudhyar's 1973 language, generalizing a specific living people's specific religious practice into a broad statement about nature worship, which is worth naming as exactly the kind of period flattening this whole quarter's provenance work has tried not to repeat. Leo's own solar rulership makes any sun ceremony a natural fit for the sign, whatever the degree's own dated handling of whose ceremony it actually is.