Virgo 23° (22° to 23°)
Sabian Symbol: A lion tamer displays his skill and character
Symbol wording: Dane Rudhyar, An Astrological Mandala (1973)
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The Essence
- Authority over something powerful comes from developed presence rather than from a chair or a whip.
- Partnering with a strong, untamed force is a different art from trying to crush it or get rid of it.
- Ongoing, daily, patient mastery differs from a single dramatic confrontation or a periodic explosive release.
- Nobility includes overcoming the specific pride that mastery and elevated status tend to generate.
- Performing one's mastery as display differs entirely from quietly practicing it day after day.
- What disturbs is not always the thing itself, but the opinion held about the thing.
- Sustained attention to something's nature produces a kind of anticipatory knowledge of what it will do next.
- Distinguishing what is within one's control from what is not is foundational to any mastery.
- Losing one's centre in a demanding situation costs authority regardless of the skill still on display.
- Readiness practiced daily differs from readiness treated as a state achieved once and passively maintained.
The Image
A trainer stands in the ring with a lion, and the audience watches him show both his skill and his character. The symbol names those two things together, and the pairing matters to you as much as to him. Skill alone could be a set of tricks, while character is what keeps the tricks from turning into an accident.
Look at the lion first, and notice that it has not been made into something else. It still has its weight, its teeth, its appetite and its moods, and every person in the seats knows that the animal could end the performance in a second. That knowledge is why we watch, since none of us would pay to see a man stand next to a sleeping dog.
Then look at the trainer. Whatever props you imagine him carrying, they are not what keeps him alive. A chair or a whip would mean little against several hundred pounds of muscle that had decided to attack. What protects him is accumulated attention: years of reading this particular animal, learning the twitch of an ear that comes before a lunge, the shift of the hind legs that means irritation, the moment when the lion has had enough for today. His safety rests on knowing the lion better than the lion knows itself, and on knowing his own fear well enough that it does not leak into his body.
The crowd sees a few minutes of display, and what we cannot see is the morning routine behind it, repeated every day, often in an empty tent, with nobody clapping. That is where the authority was built, and where it has to be rebuilt each time.
We should acknowledge that many countries now ban wild animals in circuses, and for good reasons. The degree reads best as a picture of inner work, where the lion is something in us, not a captive creature, and the ring is wherever you meet your own strongest forces.
So translate it into your own life. Picture an experienced nurse in a hospital corridor at two in the morning, facing a frightened, angry patient who is shouting and pulling at a drip. She does not match his volume or reach for restraint first. Her voice drops, her shoulders soften, she keeps a little distance and watches his hands. She has done this many times, and her calm is a skill as much as a temperament, which is good news for the rest of us. Within ten minutes he is sitting down. Nobody in the corridor applauds, and that is the point.
Jones gave this degree the keyword resoluteness. The word suggests firmness to most of us, but the firmness here is not stiffness. It is the quality you find in someone who has decided, over and over, to stay present with something powerful, and whose decision has hardened into habit.
Virgo 23° is the third stage of the 35th five-fold sequence and phase 173 of the cycle. The previous degree showed a jewelled coat of arms, a claim to rank. Here the claim is tested in the ring, where rank counts for nothing and only practised presence keeps us safe.
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The Archetype
The archetype is the tamer, or more precisely the trainer: the person whose authority comes from a long relationship with a power greater than their own. It sits close to other old figures, the horse whisperer, the shepherd among wolves, the monk who walks calmly past the tiger in the folk tale. In each case the power stays real, and what changes is the relationship between that power and the one who works with it.
It helps you to see what this archetype refuses. It refuses to kill the lion, which would end the danger and also end the life, the vitality that made the animal worth knowing. It refuses to drug or cage the lion into dullness, which is the strategy many of us adopt with our own anger, desire or ambition, and perhaps the one you learned early. And it refuses the opposite mistake too, the fantasy that the lion is a pet and can be left to roam freely through the house.
What remains is the harder option: partnership on terms the trainer has to keep earning. A powerful nature, whether an animal, an organisation, a talent or a temper, is never mastered once. You do not get to be the person who tamed the lion. You only get to be the person who is still taming it today.
There is a particular trap inside this archetype, and it concerns pride. Mastery generates status, and status generates a new animal that also needs handling. The trainer who starts performing for the crowd rather than attending to the lion has already loosened his grip, and so have you, the moment your eye turns to the seats. He is watching his own reflection in the audience's eyes, and the lion notices the gap. Many of us know this from work: the moment we become admired for our competence is the moment our competence begins to drift toward display.
So the archetype asks each of us for something like humility inside excellence. The real trainer stays a little afraid, a little curious and fully attentive, because the lion has not changed its nature to suit his reputation. What looks from the seats like confidence is closer to respect, sustained over thousands of ordinary mornings, until it becomes the steady background of a whole life.
The Taoist Current
Chapter 33 of the Dao De Jing draws a line that runs straight through the middle of this degree. Knowing others is intelligence, it says, while knowing yourself is enlightenment. Overcoming others takes force, but overcoming yourself is strength. The trainer needs both kinds of knowledge, as you do, but the second is the one that keeps us alive. If he understands the lion and not his own fear, his body will betray him. If he can defeat the lion only by force, he has already lost the relationship that makes the act possible.
The same chapter goes on to say that whoever knows they have enough is rich, and whoever perseveres has will. That second phrase belongs to this degree, and to your mornings. Resoluteness, read in a Taoist key, is not a dramatic act of willpower. It is quiet persistence, our willingness to come back to the same tent every morning without needing the morning to be special.
Chapter 55 adds a surprising image. One who holds virtue in full measure, it says, is like a newborn child. Wasps and snakes do not sting it, wild beasts do not seize it, birds of prey do not strike it. Its bones are soft and its sinews supple, yet its grip is firm. It cries all day and its voice does not grow hoarse, because its harmony is complete. The chapter then warns that forcing life, straining the breath, is the path toward early exhaustion.
Put beside the lion tamer, this is a striking correction. The chapter does not picture the master as hard. It pictures someone so unforced that wild things find nothing to attack. For you, the lesson is that authority over a powerful nature grows from softness and steadiness. Your tension invites the lunge. Your ease, earned through practice, does not.
The Yi Jing Resonance
Hexagram 26, Da Xu (The Taming Power of the Great) shows heaven contained within a mountain: a vast creative force held and stored by stillness. Its image tells the noble person to study the words and deeds of the past in order to strengthen character. Taming, in this hexagram, is accumulation: our energy is gathered and directed, not destroyed.
Two of its lines read almost like notes from a training manual. The fourth speaks of a board fixed to the head of a young bull, placed there before the horns have grown, so that the danger is prevented rather than fought. The fifth speaks of the tusk of a gelded boar: the wildness is dealt with at its root, so the tusk is no longer a threat. In both lines the method is indirect. You do not wrestle the animal; you work with its nature early and patiently, and so do we with our own.
Hexagram 45, Cui (Gathering Together) shows a lake above the earth, waters collecting into one place. It speaks of crowds, offerings, and the leader at the centre of a gathering. Its image warns that wherever many come together, the unexpected becomes likely, so the noble person renews their weapons to meet it. That is the circus tent precisely, and perhaps your workplace too: an audience gathered, a moment of display, and the constant possibility that something goes wrong.
Together the two hexagrams describe the trainer's double task, which is also ours. Store and direct great power through steady work, and stay prepared, every single time, for the moment when the crowd and the animal stop behaving as expected.
The Philosophical Content
Epictetus knew something about power from the wrong end of it. Born into slavery in the first century, he later gained his freedom and became one of the most influential Stoic teachers, first in Rome and then, after the emperor Domitian expelled the philosophers, in Nicopolis in Greece. He wrote nothing himself. His student Arrian recorded his teaching in the Discourses and in a short handbook, the Enchiridion.
That handbook opens with a division that has shaped how many of us think about stress, and it may change how you do. Some things are within our power and some are not. Our judgements, intentions, desires and aversions belong to us; our bodies, possessions, reputations and positions do not, at least not fully. Suffering comes, Epictetus taught, from treating the second group as if it belonged to the first. The trainer cannot control the lion, and you cannot control yours. He can control his attention, his breath, his response to the lion's mood, and his preparation the morning before.
A little further on, the handbook makes its most famous claim: people are disturbed not by things, but by the judgements they form about things. The lion in the ring is real, but the panic that might seize the trainer comes from his reading of the moment. If he judges the situation as a catastrophe, his body tightens and the animal feels it. If he judges it as a known difficulty, practised for, he stays loose enough to respond. We all carry this daily: the email that sends our heart racing has not yet done anything to us, while our judgement already has.
Patanjali, the compiler of the Yoga Sutras, comes at the same territory from another direction. His second sutra defines yoga as the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind, and a little later he names the two supports of that stilling: abhyasa, steady practice, and vairagya, non-attachment. Practice, he adds, becomes firmly grounded only when it is kept up for a long time, without interruption, and with devotion. That sentence could hang on the wall of every training tent, and above your desk.
Patanjali's third book introduces samyama, the combined practice of concentration, meditation and absorption held on a single object. Through samyama, he says, insight arises into the nature of what is contemplated. The trainer's anticipatory knowledge, the way he senses the lunge before it comes, is a worldly cousin of this. Sustained, undivided attention to anything gradually reveals how it moves.
Between them, the Stoic and the yogi give us a complete method. Know what is yours to govern. Practise daily, for a long time, with care. And attend so fully to the powerful thing in front of you that you know its next move before it does, which is what we mean by resoluteness.
The Evolutionary Astrology Lens
Read evolutionarily, Virgo 23° marks a soul learning how to live with power, both its own and the power of the forces it meets. In evolutionary astrology, Pluto points to the soul's core desires and to the defensive structures it has built around them, while the South and North Nodes of the Moon show the patterns it carries in and the direction it is growing.
The South Node here often describes a history of extremes in relation to instinct. Some of us arrive with a pattern of suppression, having learned that anger, desire or vitality were dangerous and had to be caged. Others carry the opposite memory: periodic eruptions, the lion let out all at once and then shut back in with guilt. Both patterns treat power as an emergency rather than a relationship, and you may recognise one of them in your own history. Both also tend to produce a life of dramatic episodes, big confrontations and big releases, with little steadiness in between.
Pluto shows what the soul believes it must control in order to be safe. With this degree prominent, that is often your own self: a fear that if the inner animal were met honestly it would destroy everything. The evolutionary crisis comes when the cage stops holding, through illness, burnout, a relationship that provokes everything, or a role that demands far more presence than suppression allows.
The North Node points toward resoluteness in its fullest sense. You are asked to replace the cycle of clamp and explosion with a daily practice of working with what is powerful in you. That means learning your own signals, building routines that keep you centred, and accepting that this will never be finished.
Pluto's polarity point, where it is relevant, asks the soul to let go of control as its main security and to trust a relationship instead. The lion is still a lion. You are simply no longer at war with it.
The Buddhist Dimension
The Pali word danta means tamed, trained, subdued, and it runs through the early Buddhist texts in images strikingly close to this degree. In the Dhammapada, a whole chapter is named for the elephant. Its speaker resolves to bear harsh words as a war elephant bears arrows in battle, and it praises trained mules, fine horses and great tusked elephants, before adding that one who has tamed themselves is finer still. Elsewhere the same collection compares the wise to irrigators who guide water, fletchers who straighten arrows and carpenters who shape wood, since all of them work with a material's nature rather than against it.
One of the traditional epithets of the Buddha calls him the unsurpassed trainer of those who can be trained. The image is not of a jailer. It is of a teacher who knows each student's temperament the way a good horse trainer knows each horse, and who leads by patience, timing and understanding. Taming, in this sense, is a form of care. The untamed mind is not evil. It is unhappy, driven from one craving to the next, and training it is how we stop suffering at its hands and how you begin to rest.
What this adds to the lion tamer is the turn inward. The lion we most need to work with is our own mind, with its reactions, fears and appetites. The tamed mind, in Buddhist terms, keeps its energy and loses its compulsion. It lets you feel anger without being dragged by it, and want something without being owned by the wanting. That is the steadiness the trainer brings into the ring, and it is built the same way: one breath, one sitting, one ordinary morning at a time.
The Soul's Work
Start by naming your lion. For some of us it is anger, the heat that rises at the kitchen table when a partner says the wrong thing. For others it is ambition, appetite, sexual energy, anxiety, or a talent so large it frightens us. Write it down plainly, without moralising. The lion is not the problem. Your relationship with it is the work.
Next, study it as the trainer studies his animal. For one week, keep a short daily note of when it stirred, what came just before, and what your body did. You are looking for early signals: a tightening in the jaw, a churning in the gut, a shift in breathing, a particular thought that always arrives first. Virgo rules digestion and much of the nervous system's response to strain, so many of us feel the lion first in the belly. That is useful information, not a fault.
Then apply the Stoic sort. Take one recent episode and divide it into what was within your control and what was not. Notice which judgement turned an event into a disturbance. You may find that the lunge started with a story you told yourself, long before anything outside you happened.
Build a daily practice that is small enough to keep. Ten minutes of sitting, a slow walk, breathing with a longer exhale, a few lines in a notebook. The content matters less than the consistency. The trainer's authority was never built in the show, and neither is yours. It was built in the empty tent, morning after morning.
Finally, watch for the display trap. When people begin to admire your calm, notice whether you start performing it. Return your attention to the lion instead of the audience.
Real mastery here is quiet, and most of us will never see it applauded. It looks like an ordinary person staying steady in a room where something powerful is moving, and it is earned again each day you choose to show up.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Sabian Symbol for Virgo 23°?
The Sabian Symbol for Virgo 23° is A lion tamer displays his skill and character, in the wording Dane Rudhyar gave it in An Astrological Mandala (1973). The image itself was channelled by Elsie Wheeler in 1925 and first recorded by Marc Edmund Jones. It is phase 173 of the 360-degree cycle, the third stage of the 35th five-fold sequence. Jones's keyword is resoluteness.
What does Virgo 23° mean in a natal chart?
A planet at Virgo 23° asks you to develop a working relationship with something powerful, inside you or around you. It may be a strong temperament, a demanding role, a volatile family or a large gift. Your growth comes from daily, patient presence rather than heroic showdowns. You are likely to gain authority over time, but only to the degree that your inner steadiness keeps pace with your outer skill.
What is the keyword for Virgo 23°?
The keyword Marc Edmund Jones assigned is RESOLUTENESS. At its best it shows as a steady, practised firmness that can stay present with powerful forces and guide them without cruelty. At its worst it turns into rigidity or showmanship, a hard grip used to dominate, or a display of control that impresses an audience while the real relationship with the power underneath is neglected.
What is the relationship between the lion and the tamer?
The relationship is a partnership built on long attention, not a victory. The lion keeps its strength and its nature; the trainer keeps his safety by reading it closely and staying centred. Neither side is erased. In inner terms, the lion is vitality, instinct or passion, and the trainer is the conscious self that learns to work with that energy without suppressing it or being overrun by it.
What is the shadow side of Virgo 23°?
The shadow appears in three forms. One is domination, controlling people or your own instincts through fear and force. Another is showmanship, where mastery becomes a performance for admiration and attention drifts from the work itself. The third is complacency, assuming that control won once will hold forever. Each of these weakens the steadiness the degree depends on, and each tends to end in the very loss of control it was meant to prevent.
How does this degree connect to earlier confrontations with the primal?
The lion is the emblem of Leo, the sign just before Virgo, so this degree shows Virgo meeting the raw vitality and pride it has inherited. Earlier in Virgo, the thirteenth degree pictures a strong hand calming political hysteria, a confrontation with collective emotion. Here the encounter becomes intimate and ongoing. Primal power is no longer something to be checked once in a crisis but a living presence we learn to work with daily.
What makes someone a true aristocrat at this degree?
The word aristocracy comes from Greek roots meaning rule by the best. At this degree, being among the best has nothing to do with birth or title. It means having done the long, unseen work that allows you to stay steady with powerful forces, and having mastered the pride that such skill tends to produce. The true aristocrat here serves the relationship with the lion and never confuses applause with authority.
How does Patanjali's concept of samyama illuminate this degree?
Samyama is the combined practice of concentration, meditation and absorption held on a single object, which Patanjali describes in the third book of the Yoga Sutras. He teaches that it yields direct insight into what is contemplated. The lion tamer's ability to sense a lunge before it comes is a practical form of this. Sustained, undivided attention to anything powerful gradually reveals how it moves, and that knowledge becomes the ground of quiet authority.
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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