Virgo 23° (22° to 23°)

The One Who Enters the Cage Must Know the Animal Better Than Themselves

Sabian Symbol: A lion tamer displays his skill and character

The Image

The lion tamer is in the ring. The lion is there too — enormous, genuinely powerful, genuinely unpredictable in the way that only a creature of genuine wildness can be unpredictable even after years of training. The tamer has a chair, a whip, perhaps a stool. These instruments are not the source of the tamer's authority. The source of the tamer's authority is the specific quality of presence — the steadiness, the absolute absence of the panic that would immediately transfer to the lion as a signal to attack, the patient resoluteness that the lion has learned to read as meaning: this human is not afraid of me, and when this human is not afraid of me, I do not need to fear.

This is not domination in the sense of suppression. The lion is still a lion. The lion's power has not been eliminated or diminished. What has been developed is the relationship — the specific, patient, deeply studied knowledge of the lion's nature, combined with the specific, patient, deeply developed quality of the tamer's own presence, that allows the two to coexist in the ring in a way that neither attacking nor fleeing is the outcome.

The display of skill and character is the same thing. The skill is the character.

If Virgo speaks to your soul — its patient intelligence, its specific, earned capacity to work with what is powerful without being overwhelmed by it — carry its energy with you. Explore the Gamla Healing Virgo collection of embroidered caps and hoodies, made for those who have learned to enter the ring with the lion and know it will not attack.

The Archetype

The thirty-fifth Virgo sequence has been tracing the development of collective and noble capacities. Virgo 21° brought the basketball team — the training of collective raw material into genuine group expression. Virgo 22° brought the coat of arms — the formal, hereditary, obligating prerogative of the noble office. And now Virgo 23° brings the lion tamer: the specific, third stage of the sequence, in which the noble must demonstrate the quality that makes the nobility genuine rather than merely claimed.

Rudhyar is explicit: the true aristocrat is the individual who is in complete control of his vital and emotional energies; at the spiritual level this includes the overcoming of pride — pride in one's strength and mastery, and the pride attached to an exalted status or social Office. The coat of arms of Virgo 22° obligates. What it obligates most specifically is this: the overcoming of pride in the very distinction that the coat of arms represents. The noblesse oblige includes the discipline of the noble's own animal nature.

This connects Virgo 23° explicitly to Virgo 16° — the karmic confrontation with the orangutan — and to Virgo 17° — the volcanic eruption. What the orange-utan confronted and the volcano released, the lion tamer now works with in a sustained, daily, patient, resolute relationship: not the confrontation, not the explosion, but the ongoing mastery.

Jung would name this precisely: the transcendent function applied to the shadow. Not the explosive release of the repressed content, not the passive confrontation with the primal — the sustained, patient, disciplined, ongoing work of integrating the vital energies into the service of genuine development. The lion tamer is the individuation process after the catharsis, after the confrontation, after the threshold state — the daily, skilled, patient work of maintaining the relationship with the lion.

The shadow Jones named — futile show-off and idle boasting — is the pride against which Rudhyar explicitly warns in this degree: the tamer who performs their mastery rather than practicing it, whose display is an end in itself rather than the evidence of genuine ongoing work with the animal's power.

The Taoist Current

Chapter 33 of the Tao Te Ching: Mastering others requires force. Mastering yourself requires strength.

The lion tamer's mastery is the mastery of the self — specifically, the mastery of the response to the lion, the mastery of the fear that the lion naturally evokes, the mastery of the pride that the mastery of the lion naturally generates. Both must be brought under the discipline of the resolute presence. The force that would suppress the lion produces only a more dangerous lion. The strength that masters the self produces the stillness that the lion reads as trustworthy.

Chapter 55: He who is in harmony with the Tao is like a newborn child. Yet its grip is firm. The firmness of the newborn child's grip is the lion tamer's authority: not the aggression of force, but the unshakeable, relaxed, genuine quality of someone who is completely in their element and therefore completely reliable in the lion's reading of them.

The Yi Jing Resonance

The primary hexagram is Hexagram 26 — Da Xu (The Taming Power of the Great) — which we have met at Leo 5°, Leo 8°, and Virgo 25°. Here it arrives in its most directly named form: the great power being tamed, not suppressed. The commentary says: holding firm. It furthers one to cross the great water. Favourable. The lion tamer holding firm — maintaining the resolute presence in the ring with the lion — is the specific, daily, patient practice of Da Xu at its most demanding level.

The hexagram's image is particularly relevant: heaven within the mountain, the creative force contained by the solid, patient, immovable structure of genuine character. The lion tamer is the mountain: the lion's power is real and enormous, and it is the tamer's character — not their physical strength, not their weapons — that contains it and works with it.

The shadow hexagram is Hexagram 45 — Cui (Gathering Together) — the gathering that requires a genuine centre. The lion tamer who has lost their centre has lost their authority in the ring, regardless of whatever skill they still display.

The Philosophical Content

Epictetus earned his place here as directly as at any Sabian degree in the series. His foundational teaching — the distinction between what is up to us and what is not up to us — is the lion tamer's essential philosophical framework. The lion's behaviour is not up to the tamer. What is up to the tamer is the specific quality of their own presence, their own steadiness, their own response to the lion's challenges. The Stoic path is the development of absolute mastery over what is genuinely within one's control — and the lion tamer who has developed this mastery has exactly the quality that the Stoic tradition cultivates.

Man is disturbed not by things, but by the opinions he has about things. The lion is disturbing not in itself but in the tamer's opinion of the lion. The tamer who has overcome the fear has genuinely developed the Stoic capacity — not the pretense of fearlessness, but the genuine absence of the opinion that makes the lion dangerous.

Patanjali returns here — whose Yoga Sutras we invoked at Virgo 24°'s unkempt man. The practice of samyama — the sustained, deep, total engagement of attention with a specific object until the distinction between the observer and the observed temporarily dissolves — is what the skilled lion tamer has achieved with the lion: the knowledge of the lion from the inside, the specific, total, disciplined attention to the lion's nature that allows the tamer to know what the lion will do before the lion knows.

The Evolutionary Astrology Lens

Jeffrey Wolf Green would read Virgo 23° as the soul's evolutionary encounter with the third level of the noble's obligation — after the prerogative has been claimed and the office assumed, the daily, patient, resolute work of maintaining the mastery of the vital energies that the office requires.

The South Node pattern here often carries the memory of having been in the ring with the lion and having either shown off (the pride of the display) or backed away (the loss of the resolute presence that the lion reads as weakness). The evolutionary challenge is the sustained, patient, daily practice of the resolute presence that genuine mastery requires — not the dramatic moment of taming but the ordinary day's maintenance of the relationship.

The North Node invitation is toward RESOLUTENESS — Jones's keyword — in its most specifically Virgoan form: the illimitable patience and adroitness in personal accomplishment that comes from the genuine, sustained, daily development of the inner mastery that the external display of skill represents. Not the show, but the character that the show is evidence of.

The Buddhist Dimension

The Buddhist concept of danta — the tamed one, the trained one, one of the epithets of the Buddha — is the lion tamer's deepest spiritual identity. The Buddha is the perfectly tamed one: the one whose vital energies have been completely brought into the service of genuine liberation, whose animal nature has been completely mastered not by suppression but by the patient, disciplined, sustained work of genuine practice.

The specific training path in Buddhism — the gradual path (lam rim in Tibetan), the systematic, patient, step-by-step development of the qualities that constitute genuine mastery — is the lion tamer's curriculum: not the dramatic breakthrough but the patient, daily, step-by-step development of the specific capacities that together constitute genuine mastery of the vital and emotional energies.

The Soul's Work

What is the lion in your ring?

Not the abstract animality — the specific, powerful, genuinely demanding quality of your own vital nature that requires the ongoing, daily, patient, resolute work of mastery rather than the dramatic single confrontation or the periodic explosive release.

Virgo 16° confronted the orangutan — the honest acknowledgment of the primal. Virgo 17° brought the volcanic eruption — the necessary cathartic release. Virgo 23° brings the daily work that follows: the lion tamer's patient, skilled, resolute practice of ongoing mastery, in which the primal energy is genuinely worked with rather than periodically confronted and periodically released.

The source material names the single exception to the general rule of dominate or be dominated: the person who has escaped conditioning finally, having completed a deep process of healing and introspection, followed by masterly self-control and the resultant passionate, focused, intentionality of being.

This is the positive degree's promise: the passionate, focused, intentionality of being that becomes available when the mastery is genuine — when the lion is not suppressed but genuinely worked with, when the vital energy is not denied but genuinely in relationship with the intelligence and the character that can direct it.

Handling in the nick of time. The lion does not wait for the tamer to be ready. The tamer is always ready — because the resoluteness is not a state to be achieved and then maintained passively but a quality to be practiced daily, in the ring, with the lion.

The Virgo collection at Gamla Healing was made for those who enter the ring daily — who have developed the specific, patient, resolute quality of presence that allows the lion to be genuinely worked with rather than fought, feared, or displayed as a trophy. Explore the Virgo 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.

Gamla Healing — bridging the inner and outer world, one degree at a time.