Leo 6° (5° to 6°)

Sabian Symbol: A conservative, old-fashioned lady is confronted by a hippie girl
Symbol wording: Dane Rudhyar, An Astrological Mandala (1973)

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The Essence

1. Two apparently opposite ways of living can each be the context that makes the other visible.
2. Rigid conventionality suppresses a vitality that has not disappeared, only gone underground into shadow.
3. Deliberate non-conformity suppresses its own opposite, a desire for rootedness and accumulated wisdom.
4. What one person finds threatening in another is often exactly what they most need to integrate.
5. Opposition between forces is not simply conflict; it is ground new understanding can grow from.
6. Neither pure conventionality nor pure rebellion holds the answer; something new emerges from the encounter between them.
7. A tradition, even with its thread broken, can carry wisdom as resource rather than fixed answer.
8. Two people inhabit different relationships to time; creative life often requires both.
9. Understanding between people does not require one side to yield; it requires an expanded, shared field.
10. Recognizing something as beautiful or good already implies its opposite; neither exists as a category alone.

The Image

A conservative, old-fashioned lady is confronted by a hippie girl

Two women meet on a pavement and neither can quite walk past. One wears a tailored coat, sensible shoes, a string of pearls and perhaps gloves, though the weather does not call for them. The other is barefoot or nearly so, in a long skirt of mixed colours, with flowers in her hair and an opinion on her face. The symbol says the older woman is confronted. We are not told who started it.

Each of them is a whole way of living. The older woman stands for continuity: manners, thrift, a sense that things were done a certain way for reasons, even if the reasons have been forgotten. The younger one stands for rupture: the conviction that the old forms were cages and that life begins when you step out of them. You can feel the heat between them without either saying a word.

Look more closely, though, and the picture shifts. The older woman's composure only reads as composure because the girl's freedom is standing beside it. The girl's freedom only reads as freedom because there is a buttoned coat to be free from. Each is the background that makes the other visible. Take one away and the other loses half its meaning.

We meet this scene constantly, in forms that have nothing to do with the 1960s. You may know it from a family dinner where a grandmother and a grandchild argue about marriage, or about tattoos, or about whether anyone should work on a Sunday. You may know it at work, where the colleague who has kept the same procedures for twenty years faces a newcomer who wants to tear them up in the first month. Most of us have been both women at different times in our lives.

Think of a market stall run by a family for three generations. The daughter comes back from university and wants to sell online, change the sign and drop half the old stock. Her father hears an attack on everything he built. She hears a man who will not let the world in. If either of them wins outright, the stall probably dies. If they stay in the argument long enough, they might find a business neither could have imagined alone.

Jones gave this degree the keyword contrast. A contrast is not a fight. In painting and photography it is the difference that lets a shape be seen at all, and without it everything turns to grey. The degree asks you to see the other person as the edge that gives your own outline its definition.

This is the first step of the twenty-sixth sequence of five, phase 126 of the cycle. A first stage introduces a new theme in its raw form, and here the theme is the meeting of opposites that cannot simply ignore one another.

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The Archetype

The archetype here is the encounter between the keeper and the breaker. The keeper guards what has been handed down. The breaker insists that what was handed down is no longer enough. Every society needs both, and every society suffers when either one takes over completely.

What makes this archetype rich is that each figure carries the other in hiding. The proper lady was once a girl, and somewhere under the starch there is a vitality she learned to keep quiet. When she meets the barefoot young woman, part of her outrage is grief for that buried life. You can often hear it in the very sharpness of her disapproval, which is louder than the situation calls for.

The young woman has her own hidden opposite. Her rebellion is real, but it is also a reaction, and reactions are shaped by what they push against. Underneath the flowers is a longing for roots, for a lineage, for someone older who knows how to do things and will take the time to show her. She may not admit it for years. When she does, she may find herself oddly drawn to the very rituals she mocked.

This is why the meeting stings so much. What we find threatening in another person is often exactly what we most need to take back into ourselves. The older woman needs some of the girl's spontaneity. The girl needs some of the older woman's patience and craft. Each one is standing in front of a lost part of herself. We all do this more than we admit. The people we cannot stop complaining about are often the ones carrying something we set down years ago, and our complaint is a way of keeping it at arm's length while still keeping it in view.

The shadow of the archetype is a frozen standoff, in which both sides harden and each uses the other as proof that it was right all along. The healthy expression is slower and less dramatic: a willingness to stay in the encounter, to keep talking, and to let both outlines shift a little. We rarely end such meetings in agreement. We can end them larger than we began.

The Taoist Current

Chapter 2 of the Dao De Jing begins with a claim that fits this degree exactly. When everyone recognises beauty as beauty, ugliness has already appeared; when everyone recognises good as good, the not good has already come along with it. Being and non-being give rise to one another, difficult and easy complete each other, long and short define each other, high and low lean on each other. Neither woman exists as a category on her own.

Chapter 28 turns this into practice. It advises knowing the masculine while keeping to the feminine, knowing the white while keeping to the black, knowing honour while keeping to humility. Each pair is held together rather than split, and your task is to know your side without disowning the other. The chapter repeatedly calls the one who does this a ravine or valley of the world, a low place where everything can gather, and it speaks of returning to the uncarved block, a state before rigid categories set in. For our two women, this is a hard and useful teaching. Each could know her own position fully while keeping a door open to its opposite.

Chapter 40 is only a few lines long. It says that returning is the movement of the Dao and that yielding is how it works. Things come from being, and being comes from non-being. Applied to this meeting, it suggests that cultures move in returns: the rebellion of one generation often comes back, in altered form, as the tradition of the next. You can watch it happen within a single family across fifty years.

The Yi Jing Resonance

Hexagram 38, Kui (Opposition) places fire above the lake. Fire rises, water sinks, and the two move apart. The classical image compares this to two sisters living in one house whose wills go in different directions. Even so, the judgement says that in small matters there is good fortune, and the image text advises the noble person to keep their own individuality while remaining in fellowship with others. That is a precise description of what this degree asks. You can stay yourself without leaving the room. We tend to assume that difference must end either in agreement or in a door slammed shut, and Kui quietly offers a third option.

Hexagram 39, Jian (Obstruction) shows water on top of a mountain, a dangerous passage ahead. When the way is blocked, the hexagram advises turning inward to work on one's own character rather than pushing blindly against the obstacle. It also speaks of the value of seeing a wise person, someone who can guide us through. In the meeting between the two women, the obstruction is each one's certainty. The hexagram suggests that before you try to change the other person, you look at what in yourself is making the passage so hard. Our own rigidity is usually the part of the mountain we can do something about.

The Philosophical Content

Hannah Arendt thought carefully about what happens when a tradition breaks. In the essays collected as Between Past and Future, she argued that the thread of tradition in the West had snapped in the modern age, and she borrowed a line from the poet René Char to describe the situation: our inheritance was left to us by no testament. The past is no longer handed down with clear instructions on how to use it. Arendt did not see this as simply a loss. Writing about Walter Benjamin, she described the thinker as a kind of pearl diver who goes down into the depths of the past, not to restore it as it was, but to bring up rich and strange fragments that can live again in the present.

Arendt also wrote about education in a way that speaks directly to this scene. She insisted that each new generation brings something new into the world, which she tied to her idea of natality, the fact that we are born as beginners. Yet she argued that teaching must also conserve, protecting the young from being thrown into the world unprepared and protecting the world from being remade carelessly by each new arrival. The old lady and the young woman are, in Arendt's terms, the world and the newcomer. Each needs the other to be fully what she is.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, in Truth and Method, developed a theory of understanding that also refuses easy victory. He argued that we never come to anything without prejudices, in the older sense of prior judgements formed by our history and language. These are not simply errors to be removed; they are the starting point that makes understanding possible at all. Each of us stands within a horizon, a range of vision shaped by where we come from.

Understanding, for Gadamer, happens through what he called a fusion of horizons. When two people meet in real conversation, neither simply adopts the other's view, and neither simply wins. Both horizons widen until they share enough ground for something new to appear. Gadamer modelled this on open dialogue, where the subject matter itself leads and both partners are changed. Applied to the two women, his idea suggests that the outcome of their encounter is not a winner but a wider field that each can now stand in. If you have ever left an argument seeing your own view from the outside for the first time, you have had a taste of what he meant.

Together, Arendt and Gadamer offer a mature picture of tradition. It is neither a set of rules to obey nor a pile of rubbish to clear away. It is a resource that comes alive through encounter with the new.

The Evolutionary Astrology Lens

Read evolutionarily, planets at this degree suggest a soul working with contrast: learning to see itself through the friction of difference rather than in isolation. Earlier patterns may have involved strongly fixed roles, either as a guardian of convention or as a dedicated outsider, with little room for the opposite.

In evolutionary astrology, Pluto points to the deepest place of attachment and fear. At this degree, the Plutonian fear often concerns losing your identity if you let the other side in. A traditionalist fears that any opening means collapse. A rebel fears that any compromise means betraying the self she fought for. Both are using an opposite to hold a shape in place. We see this in our own families when one sibling becomes the responsible one and another the wild one, and each spends decades needing the other to stay in role so that their own identity holds.

The South Node of the Moon shows how this habit has played out. You may find yourself repeatedly cast in the same role in groups, either the one who defends how things were or the one who challenges every rule. It can feel like personality, yet it is partly a groove worn by long repetition.

The North Node points toward something less comfortable and more alive. It asks you to stay in conversation with your opposite long enough to be changed by it. Pluto's polarity point, the sign opposite natal Pluto, often names the quality that softens the grip, and here it usually involves curiosity about the other person's world rather than defending your own. For many with this degree emphasised, growth comes when you begin to recognise your opposite's gifts as missing pieces of yourself, rather than as threats to be managed. We become more whole, not less ourselves, when we let the person across the table teach us something.

The Buddhist Dimension

The meeting at Leo 6° is a vivid picture of dependent origination, the Buddhist teaching that nothing arises on its own. Every phenomenon comes into being through conditions, and when the conditions change, the phenomenon changes too. The traditional formula is brief: when this exists, that comes to be; when this ceases, that ceases. We usually apply this to grand questions of suffering and rebirth, yet it works just as well on a street corner.

Applied to our two women, the teaching cuts through the idea that either is a fixed type. The proper lady is the product of a particular history, upbringing, class and fear. The young woman is the product of hers, including the very conventions she is reacting against. In a real sense, the older woman helped create the younger one, and the younger one gives the older one her definition. Neither stands outside the web, and neither do we when we take sides in their quarrel. Our own reactions to the scene, whether we cheer the girl or sympathise with the lady, arise from our histories too.

This insight can soften the encounter. If you see that your position arose from conditions, you hold it with more humility. If you see that your opponent's position arose the same way, you can meet her with more patience. We do not need to give up our convictions to do this. We simply hold them as part of a larger pattern, which makes it easier to learn from the person across the pavement.

The Soul's Work

The work at this degree begins with honesty about your role. In families, teams and friendships, are you more often the keeper or the breaker? Most of us lean one way, and we tend to meet the other type with irritation that is out of proportion to what they have done.

Choose one person who annoys you in this way. It might be an older relative who insists on old forms, or a younger colleague who dismisses everything that came before. Write down exactly what bothers you about them, then ask what quality in that list you have pushed out of your own life. The answer is often uncomfortable and almost always useful.

Next, practise curious conversation. Ask the other person how they came to see things the way they do. Listen for the history behind their position, as Gadamer would suggest, rather than for openings to argue. You do not have to agree. The aim is to widen both horizons, not to win.

Then try borrowing something. If you are a keeper, adopt one small practice from the breaker's world for a month: a new route, a new tool, a looser schedule. If you are a breaker, take up one practice from the keeper's world: a ritual, a craft, a regular meal with someone older. Notice what each borrowed habit teaches you.

Leo rules the heart and the upper back, and much of this tension lives in the chest when we brace against someone. A simple practice before a hard conversation is to place a hand on the sternum and breathe slowly into it for a minute, letting the chest soften before you speak.

Over time, the meeting between the two women stops being a confrontation and becomes a collaboration. What grows from it belongs to neither of them alone, and it is usually better than anything either could have made by herself.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Sabian Symbol for Leo 6°?

The Sabian Symbol for Leo 6° is A conservative, old-fashioned lady is confronted by a hippie girl, 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 126 of the 360-degree cycle, the first stage of the 26th five-fold sequence. Jones's keyword is contrast.

What does Leo 6° mean in a natal chart?

Leo 6° in a chart points to someone who grows through meeting their opposite. The gift is a vivid sense of identity sharpened by contrast. The challenge is not to freeze into one role, whether guardian of tradition or rebel against it. Planets here ask you to see the people who provoke you as carriers of qualities you need, and to let encounters widen your sense of who you are.

What is the keyword for Leo 6°?

The keyword Marc Edmund Jones assigned is CONTRAST. At its best it means the ability to let difference sharpen perception, so that you understand yourself and others more clearly through their distinctness. At its weakest it becomes polarisation, a habit of defining yourself only against an enemy and treating every difference as a battle that someone must lose.

What is the shadow side of Leo 6°?

The shadow is a frozen standoff. Each side uses the other as proof of its own rightness, and identity becomes dependent on having someone to oppose. Traditionalists turn rigid and scornful; rebels turn reactive and rootless. Underneath, both are avoiding the parts of themselves the other represents. The result is stuckness, where nothing new can grow because neither side will stay open long enough to learn.

How does Arendt's concept of tradition relate to this degree?

Arendt argued that the thread of tradition had broken in the modern age, leaving an inheritance without instructions. Rather than mourning or discarding the past, she pictured thinkers diving for fragments that can live again. At this degree, the older woman holds such fragments and the younger woman brings the new beginning Arendt called natality. Each needs the other for tradition to become a resource instead of a cage.

How does Gadamer's fusion of horizons apply here?

Gadamer held that understanding never starts from nowhere; each of us stands within a horizon shaped by history. When two people converse in good faith, their horizons widen and overlap, producing a shared field neither had before. At this degree, the meeting between convention and rebellion can lead to such a fusion. Neither side has to surrender. Both come away seeing more than they did.

How does Pluto factor into the Evolutionary Astrology Lens at this degree?

Pluto shows where the soul fears losing itself. At this degree, the fear is that letting in the opposite will dissolve your identity, whether as keeper of tradition or as rebel. The evolutionary task is to loosen that grip, allowing contact with your opposite to reshape you. Growth comes when you see the other person's qualities as missing pieces of yourself rather than threats.

How does the Yi Jing illuminate this degree?

Hexagram 38 describes opposition, like two sisters under one roof whose wills diverge, and advises keeping your individuality while staying in fellowship. Hexagram 39 shows an obstacle ahead and counsels turning inward to work on your own character. Together they suggest that this meeting of opposites can bring small, real progress when each side stays present and looks honestly at its own part in the difficulty.

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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