Leo 23° (22° to 23°)

Standing on the Horse at Full Gallop

Sabian Symbol: In a circus the bareback rider displays her dangerous skill

The Image

The ring is lit. The horse is at full gallop — not trotting, not cantering, but the full, powerful, ground-shaking run of an animal that weighs half a ton and is expressing the entire force of its nature.

And on its back: a woman, standing upright.

Not sitting. Not holding a saddle. Not with her hands on reins that might give her some minimal control. Standing. On the back of a horse at full gallop. With her arms out, her body balanced on the constantly shifting surface of a living animal moving at speed, her entire physical intelligence concentrated on the single, ongoing act of not falling — and making it look as though falling were not even a theoretical possibility.

The crowd watches. The crowd holds its breath. The crowd knows what would happen if she fell, and the knowing of it is part of what makes the watching so alive.

This is audacity. Not recklessness — recklessness would be the person who climbed on the horse without the training. Audacity is the person who climbed on the horse with all the training, knowing exactly what the risk is, and doing it anyway because the skill exists and the risk is the point.

The bareback rider is not pretending the fall couldn't happen. She has calculated it, practiced for it, developed the reflexes that would handle it if it did. And then she stood up anyway.

If Leo speaks to your soul — its solar fire, its genuine delight in the display of mastered skill, its audacity in the face of what could go wrong — carry its energy with you. Explore the Gamla Healing Leo collection of embroidered caps and hoodies, made for those who stand up on the horse.

The Archetype

The sequence across Leo 21°–23° has been tracing what happens when the solar fire encounters the realm of genuine spiritual and vital power. Leo 21° showed the intoxicated chicken — the encounter with potent energy before the training is in place. Leo 22° showed the carrier pigeon — the trained, purposeful, service-oriented direction of that energy toward a specific destination. And now Leo 23° shows the bareback rider: the mastery of vital energy so complete that it can be displayed in a circus ring, for an audience, with all the risk made visible and handled simultaneously.

Jung would read the horse — which he discussed at length in his own symbolic work — as one of the most powerful and most consistent symbols of the libido: the vital energy of the unconscious, the raw, impetuous, potentially overwhelming force of nature within the psyche. Tamed, it becomes the vehicle of the ego's conscious direction. Mastered to the degree that the bareback rider demonstrates, it becomes the vehicle of something more than mere direction — it becomes the vehicle of virtuosity, the display of mastery so complete that the power and the person who holds the power appear to be operating as a single, integrated unit.

This is not the suppression of the vital energy. The horse is still at full gallop. The power is real, the speed is real, the risk is real. What has changed is the ego's relationship to that power: not dominated by it, not in flight from it, not artificially restraining it — standing on it, directing it, making it serve the act while the act makes visible the mastery of the force that the untrained person could not withstand.

The shadow Jones named is sharp and specifically Leo: idle self-display and intemperate desire for applause — the bareback rider who has learned the trick but whose only relationship to it is the crowd's response, who no longer feels the horse but only the audience, who is performing rather than riding. This is the Leo shadow at its most precise: the skill real but the motivation hollow, the mastery present but the purpose evacuated, the circus act disconnected from any genuine function except the entertainment of the watching crowd.

The Taoist Current

Chapter 10 of the Tao Te Ching: Carrying body and soul and embracing the one, can you avoid separation? Attending fully and becoming supple, can you be as a newborn babe? Washing and cleansing the primal vision, can you be without stain? Loving all men and ruling the country, can you be without cleverness? Opening and closing the gates of heaven, can you play the role of woman? Understanding and being open to all things, are you able to do nothing?

The bareback rider embodies the first of these: carrying body and soul and embracing the one. The feat of standing on the galloping horse requires exactly this — the absolute integration of body and awareness, the sustained absence of separation between the rider's intention and the rider's body and the horse's motion. There is no gap between thought and action here. The gap would produce the fall.

Chapter 15: The ancient masters were subtle, mysterious, profound, responsive. Being thus deeply engaged, they could not be expressed well in ordinary words. The bareback rider's mastery is like this: it cannot be adequately described because it is not a set of rules applied to a situation but a quality of presence that has become second nature through long training.

Wu wei at Leo 23° is the bareback rider's form: not the suppression of the force or the deliberate management of it at a distance, but the complete ease that has arrived on the other side of enormous effort. The rider has worked intensely to develop the capacity to stand on the horse. And now, standing, there is no effort — only the ease of mastery.

The Yi Jing Resonance

The primary hexagram is Hexagram 34 — Da Zhuang (The Power of the Great). Thunder above heaven — the image of enormous, upward-moving force, the yang energy at its most powerful and most expansive. This hexagram describes the moment when accumulated strength becomes fully available — when the development that has been building is ready to express itself in full, visible, unambiguous force.

The commentary carries a critical warning that applies precisely to this degree: perseverance furthers. Power must be grounded in righteousness to be great. The bareback rider's power — the raw, impressive force of the horse and the skill of the rider — is genuinely great. But it is great in the sense that Hexagram 34 means only when it is grounded in genuine skill, genuine training, genuine purpose. The power that is merely spectacular, that serves nothing beyond the spectacle, is Da Zhuang without the righteousness — great power, but power that tends toward its own excess.

The shadow hexagram is Hexagram 20 — Guan (Contemplation / The View). Wind above earth — the image of careful observation, of stepping back to see the whole. The bareback rider must have this as the complement of the display: the capacity to step back from the performance and genuinely assess what the performance is for, whether the skill is being used in service of something genuinely worth serving, whether the audacity is connected to genuine purpose or has become its own justification.

The Philosophical Current

Nietzsche would find in the bareback rider one of his most exact and most vivid illustrations of what he meant by self-overcoming — the continuous, voluntary engagement with the forces that exceed the ordinary self's capacity, for the sake of becoming the person who can handle those forces. The bareback rider has genuinely overcome something — the fear of falling, the inadequacy of the untrained body, the rider's ordinary relationship to the horse's power — and what she has become through the overcoming is genuinely more than she was before.

For Nietzsche, this is not a metaphor. It is the actual structure of genuine human development: the voluntary engagement with what exceeds you, the sustained training that turns the overwhelming into the manageable, the manageable into the masterable, the masterable into the vehicle of virtuosity.

What doesn't kill me makes me stronger. But Nietzsche's stronger is not simply tougher. It is more capable — more specifically capable, in the way that the bareback rider is more capable of standing on the galloping horse than she was before the training.

Schiller would bring his concept of aesthetic grace — Anmut — the specific quality that appears when the moral and the physical are perfectly integrated, when what is noble in character is expressed in what is beautiful in form. The bareback rider at Leo 23° is the most immediate and most vivid possible expression of Anmut: the skill so completely integrated with the person who possesses it that it appears effortless, the power so completely in service of the act that the act looks like play rather than like mastery of something genuinely dangerous.

For Schiller, this quality — aesthetic grace — is one of the highest expressions available to a human being: the moment when what is deeply practiced and deeply understood appears as spontaneous ease.

Aristotle would bring his concept of excellence in action — arete expressed in praxis — the specific form of virtue that is not merely the possession of capacity but the expression of that capacity in concrete, specific, excellently performed acts. The bareback rider's feat is arete in its most dramatically visible form: not a character trait, not a philosophical position, but a specific act performed at the highest possible level of excellence, in public, with all the risk made visible.

William James would bring his concept of the will to believe and its relation to genuine action — his insistence that the readiness to act in the face of genuine uncertainty is not mere irrationality but one of the foundational and most productive of human stances. The bareback rider who steps onto the galloping horse does not know she won't fall. She has calculated the probability, trained to reduce it, developed the reflexes that would handle it — and then acts on the basis of genuine skill and genuine trust in that skill, rather than waiting for the certainty that will never come.

This is James's will to believe in its most physical and most audacious form: the willingness to act fully in the face of genuine risk, because the alternative — never standing on the horse at all — is its own form of failure.

Keats would bring negative capability one final time: the bareback rider in the performance ring is the most perfect embodiment of this quality that Leo has yet offered. She is in uncertainty — the horse could shift, she could lose her balance, the fall is always possible — and she is remaining there without any irritable reaching after certainty. She is not standing on the horse because she is certain she won't fall. She is standing on it in full knowledge that she might, and finding in that full-knowing, full-risking stance the specific quality of alive presence that nothing safer could produce.

The Evolutionary Astrology Lens

Jeffrey Wolf Green would read Leo 23° as the soul's evolutionary encounter with virtuosity — the specific quality of mastery that comes from the sustained, voluntary engagement with what exceeds the ordinary self's capacity, until the excess becomes the vehicle of genuine excellence.

The South Node pattern at Leo 23° often carries the memory of having the skill without the audacity — of having developed genuine capacity but having been unwilling to display it in the context of genuine risk, to stand on the horse in public, to allow the fall to be possible in front of an audience. Or: the memory of having the audacity without the skill — of having climbed on the horse before the training was sufficient, producing the Leo 21° confusion rather than the Leo 23° virtuosity.

The North Node invitation is toward AUDACITY — Jones's keyword — understood as the specific, trained courage to display genuine mastery in the context of genuine risk, for the sake of something that the display makes available to those who witness it. The crowd watching the bareback rider is not merely entertained. Their imagination is raised above the commonplace. They see something that shows them what is possible. The audacity of the display is in service of this — in service of the expanding sense of human possibility that the witnessed virtuosity produces.

Stephen Arroyo would note that Leo 23° is the third stage of the twenty-ninth sequence — and Rudhyar described it as the stage at which the ego is in control, is a great showman, but serves a purpose. The performance stirs the imagination of the young consciousness. The sequence has moved from the warning (Leo 21°) through the ideal (Leo 22°) to the demonstration (Leo 23°): the lived, visible, public expression of the mastered skill, in the full ring of the circus, with the crowd watching.

The Buddhist Dimension

The Buddhist concept of upāya-kauśalya — the perfection of skillful means, the development of the specific capacity to make the teaching available in exactly the form that each being needs — is one expression of what the bareback rider embodies at the spiritual level. The bareback rider has developed a specific skill to such a level of mastery that she can deploy it in conditions of genuine risk, for an audience, in a way that makes something genuinely available to those who watch.

The Buddhist perfections — pāramitā — include vīrya, often translated as energy or diligence, but more precisely the specific quality of courageous, sustained effort that faces genuine difficulty and keeps going rather than retreating to safer ground. The bareback rider's training embodies vīrya: not the easy effort of what comes naturally, but the sustained, often exhausting, genuinely risky engagement with what exceeds the ordinary capacity.

The concept of fearlessness — abhaya — in the Mahayana tradition is not the absence of the knowledge that something could go wrong. It is the quality of remaining genuinely open and genuinely present in the face of that knowledge, without allowing the possibility of loss to foreclose the genuine engagement. The bareback rider is abhaya: she knows the horse could throw her, and she stands up anyway, with full presence to what is actually happening, without defensive contraction.

The Soul's Work

What is the horse you have been training to stand on?

Not the horse of the person next to you. Not the horse that would be most impressive at the party. The specific horse that your specific life — with all its development and all its reckoning — has been preparing you to ride bareback.

And: are you standing up? Or are you still sitting, with your hands on an imaginary saddle, waiting for a certainty that will never come?

Leo 23° is the degree that asks for the audacity that follows the training. Not before the training — that's Leo 21°'s mistake. After the training. The training is done. The skill is genuinely there. The horse is galloping.

The crowd is watching. Not because you need the crowd — though there is something genuine about the public dimension of virtuosity, something that the private mastery cannot quite produce. But because what you are about to do, done fully and done well, will raise the imagination of everyone watching above what they thought was possible.

Self-contained integrity. As the source material closes. Not the integrity of the rigid rule-follower. The integrity of the person whose skill is so completely integrated with who they are that standing on the horse at full gallop is not a performance of self but an expression of self — completely, audaciously, beautifully themselves.

Stand up.

The Leo collection at Gamla Healing was made for those who have done the training and are ready to stand up — who know what audacity genuinely looks like from the inside and who are willing to make it visible. Explore the Leo collection.

This interpretation draws on the 360 symbolic images channelled by Elsie Wheeler in 1925, as recorded and organised by Marc Edmund Jones and later developed by Dane Rudhyar in Astrological Mandala (1973) — read here through the lens of depth psychology, Eastern philosophy, and evolutionary astrology.

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