The influenza of the Sun

Have you ever tried to imitate the influence of the Sun?

That is what scientists in the Middle Ages tried to do through alchemy. They thought they could turn base metals into gold:

They wanted to imitate the influence of the Sun, which was traditionally thought responsible, under God, for making all the gold that already existed in the Earth. This, we might say, was the original understanding of ‘solar power.’

–The Narnia Code: C.S. Lewis and the Secret of the Seven Heavens by Michael Ward

It’s currently Leo season. Leo is the temple of the Sun and symbolized by the lion. As James Hillman describes it:

The heart of the lion is like the sun: round and full and whole. The classical symbolisms of this heart are gold, king, redness, sol, sulfur, heat. It glows in the center of our being and radiates outward, magnaminous, paternal, encouraging.

The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World by James Hillman

That brings us to the current Full Moon in Aquarius. Full Moons are polarities, with the Moon in Aquarius opposite the Sun in Leo.

When we consider Leo, with its focus on a heart-centered personal journey, we also need to take into consideration Aquarius, its opposite sign, which is the temple of Saturn and emphasizes the intellect and the collective.

Carl Jung was born under a Leo Sun and an Aquarius rising sign. One of the major themes in his work is that we should not capitulate to collective norms and should instead strive towards our own individuation.

By contrast, a major emphasis of James Hillman’s work was that if we focus too much on the inner soul and neglect the outer soul, we contribute to the decline of the world. Hillman had Jupiter and Mars – the Sage and the Warrior – in Aquarius in his natal chart.

Another example of this Leo-Aquarius polarity comes from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis, which is a book drenched in Sun symbolism. In a subtle reference to alchemy, Eustace gets greedy when he discovers a pool that turns everything it touches into gold. Suddenly he wants to turn all the things into gold and rake in the money.

Of course that doesn’t work out so well for Eustace. His greed turns him into a dragon and he desperately tries to remove the dragon skin, but is unsuccessful.

Aslan the lion – a solar figure – appears and removes it for him. Eustace says, “The first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart.”

After this, Eustace evolves from a self-absorbed individual to someone who embodies more Aquarian traits, with a greater focus on the collective and a more cooperative approach to life.

There will never be perfect balance between the Aquarius-Leo axis in our lives, but we can regularly remind ourselves that, as James Hollis says, “group action can be no more efficacious than the sum of individual consciousness brought to it.” A deeper understanding of the Sun’s placement in your astrology chart, and of your Aquarius-Leo axis, are two practical ways astrology can begin to assist with this.

C.S. Lewis prefered the metaphorical use of the word influence in astrological passages, which was influenza. Therefore the change in Eustace was brought about by the influenza of the Sun through Aslan.

Rather than trying to imitate the Sun’s influence like the alchemists, we should instead allow its “influenza” to transform us from within, letting its light guide our personal growth while also illuminating our contributions to the collective.

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