Virgo 24° (23° to 24°)
What the Lion Tamer Must Remember on the Way Home
Sabian Symbol: Mary and her little lamb
The Image
After the lion tamer's cage, after the coat of arms, after the basketball team's collective intensity — Mary and her little white lamb.
The image is completely disarming. A small girl and her lamb, the lamb following her because it knows her, because she loves it, because love is the reason it follows. Nothing to prove. Nothing to display. Nothing to accomplish except the walking-together that is itself the whole point.
Rudhyar places this symbol deliberately after the lion tamer and the coat of arms and the royal prerogative. The sequence has been developing great things: the discipline of vital energies, the assumption of noble office, the group integration of the basketball team. And now — in the fourth position, the position that often carries the most subtle and most essential correction — Mary and her lamb.
The correction is this: all the great development, all the genuine mastery, all the authentic prerogative and earned distinction — none of it is worth carrying if it costs the person the specific quality that Mary radiates without trying. The wide-eyed expectation. The artlessness. The pure, spontaneous, non-violent approach to all encounters. The lamb that follows not because it is commanded but because it is loved.
Beyond individual prowess and social eminence, the individual whose innocence is fixed upon spiritual realization should genuinely radiate innocence.
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The Archetype
The thirty-fifth Virgo sequence has been one of the most demanding in the sign. Virgo 21° trained the collective in group expression. Virgo 22° conferred the noble office and its exacting obligations. Virgo 23° demanded the daily, patient, resolute mastery of the vital energies. And now Virgo 24° brings the quality without which all of this development becomes the ego's new trophy: innocence.
Rudhyar's warning is specific and carries the weight of genuine spiritual teaching: without such a deep, heartfelt simplicity the seeker after spiritual experiences or initiation is bound to find himself glamorized by his own successes, and to see his ego feeding on the drama of struggle and victory. The lion taming was real. The coat of arms was earned. And now the question is whether the lion tamer and the noble can also be Mary — whether the mastery and the prerogative have been held lightly enough that they have not become the ego's new form of pride.
Jung would recognise this as the specific form of spiritual inflation that follows genuine achievement — the state in which the ego appropriates the genuine development as its own achievement rather than recognising that the development has come through rather than from the individual. Mary does not own the lamb. The lamb follows her because she loves it. The love is the relationship. The relationship is the gift. This is not the lion tamer's display — it is something entirely different.
The shadow Jones named: happy-go-lucky vacuity of spirit and understanding — the artlessness that is merely the absence of development rather than its fruit. The difference between the genuine innocence of Mary and the empty-headedness that has never encountered the lion is essential: the innocence Virgo 24° points toward is not the innocence of ignorance but the innocence that has been through the lion's cage and the coat of arms and has retained — or recovered — the essential quality of non-grasping that the lamb requires.
The Taoist Current
Chapter 28 of the Tao Te Ching: Know the masculine, keep to the feminine, and be the valley of the world. Being the valley of the world, eternal virtue will never leave you. Return to the state of the infant.
Mary and her lamb is this return: the capacity, after all the masculine development of mastery and office and discipline, to return to the state of the infant — not through regression but through the genuine integration that allows the developed, mature, capable adult to carry the child's quality of trust as the innermost orientation of their whole being.
Chapter 55: He who is in harmony with the Tao is like a newborn child. Wasps and snakes will not sting it. Wild beasts will not attack it. Its bones are soft and its muscles weak but its grip is firm.
The lamb follows Mary without being commanded. The newborn child's grip is firm without force. These are the same quality. The innocence is not the absence of strength but the specific quality of strength that does not require assertion.
Chapter 76: When alive, a man is soft and supple. When dead he is hard and stiff. The hard and strong belong to death. The soft and gentle belong to life. Mary is soft and gentle. The lamb follows life.
The Yi Jing Resonance
The primary hexagram is Hexagram 25 — Wu Wang (Innocence / The Unexpected). Heaven above thunder — the image of the creative force in its most immediate, most spontaneous, most unpremeditated expression: the action that arises directly from the genuinely good inner condition, without calculation or strategy or the intention to produce a particular effect.
The commentary says: innocence. Supreme success. Perseverance furthers. If someone is not as he should be he has misfortune, and it does not further him to undertake anything. The innocence of Hexagram 25 is not the absence of development. It is the specific, genuine, spontaneous orientation toward what is genuinely good that arises naturally from the person who has genuinely become what they should be. Mary does not calculate how to make the lamb follow. The lamb follows because Mary is genuinely what she is.
The shadow hexagram is Hexagram 46 — Sheng (Pushing Upward) — the ambitious ascending, the intentional effort toward the higher. This is the shadow of Virgo 24°: the artlessness that has been replaced by the strategy of appearing artless, the innocence that has been appropriated as a spiritual technique rather than lived as a genuine quality.
The Philosophical Content
William Blake earned his place here through his entire poetic project — and specifically through the Songs of Innocence and Experience, the specific, sustained meditation on what innocence is, what experience does to innocence, and what remains available on the far side of experience.
Blake's innocence is not ignorance. It is the specific quality of direct, unmediated, joyful engagement with existence that the child has naturally and that the genuinely developed adult can recover — not by unlearning experience but by genuinely integrating it until the experience no longer interrupts the innocence. The Lamb from his Songs of Innocence — Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? — is Mary's lamb: the same creature, the same quality, the same invitation to the specific, artless, genuinely open engagement with what is genuinely there.
Blake's counterpart in the Songs of Experience — the Tyger — is the lion tamer's lion. And Blake's entire project is the holding of both: the lamb and the tyger, innocence and experience, the artless and the resolute, in the single, genuinely integrated human consciousness that has moved through experience and recovered innocence on its far side.
Wordsworth would bring his concept of the spots of time — the specific, luminous, formative moments in childhood experience that continue to nourish and sustain the developed adult's capacity for genuine encounter with existence. The child's wide-eyed expectation that the source material invokes is Wordsworth's primary value: the specific quality of perceptual openness that the child has naturally and that the genuinely developed poet strives all their life to maintain.
The Child is father of the Man. Not in the sense that the adult's development supersedes the child's innocence — in the sense that the child's innocence is the origin, the root, the formative source from which all genuine development must ultimately draw its sustaining power.
The Evolutionary Astrology Lens
Jeffrey Wolf Green would read Virgo 24° as the soul's evolutionary encounter with the fourth-stage correction of the thirty-fifth sequence — the subtle hint of technique that Rudhyar identifies at this position. After the group training (Virgo 21°), the noble office (Virgo 22°), and the lion tamer's resoluteness (Virgo 23°), the fourth stage consistently brings the quality that the preceding development most risks losing.
What does the great development risk losing? The artlessness. The child's quality of trust. The genuine, spontaneous, non-strategic openness to what is genuinely there. The lamb that follows not because it is commanded but because it is loved.
The South Node pattern here often carries the memory of having reached a point of genuine development and having allowed the ego to appropriate it — to become the lion tamer who has forgotten how to be Mary, the noble who has allowed the coat of arms to replace the quality of being from which genuine nobility arises.
The North Node invitation is toward ARTLESSNESS — Jones's keyword — in its most genuinely spiritual form: the specific, recovered, integrated innocence of the developed adult who has retained or reclaimed the child's quality of wide-eyed expectation without losing any of the genuine development that the preceding degrees have produced.
The Buddhist Dimension
The Buddhist concept of beginner's mind — shoshin in Zen — is Mary's essential quality. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few. The lion tamer who has become the expert risks exactly this: the closure of possibility that expertise can produce, the substitution of the known response for the genuine, fresh, present engagement with what is actually there.
Mary's lamb does not follow her because she has expertise with lambs. It follows her because she is genuinely present to it, genuinely loving, genuinely open to the specific lamb that is actually there rather than to her category of what lambs are. This is beginner's mind applied to relationship: the freshness that does not let prior knowledge close the genuine encounter.
The concept of mushin — no-mind, the state of genuine, non-grasping, spontaneous action that arises from the genuinely integrated person — is the quality that the lion tamer of Virgo 23° is developing toward and that Mary of Virgo 24° already embodies. The greatest masters in every tradition — the swordsman, the calligrapher, the archer — describe their highest achievement as arriving at exactly this: the artless, spontaneous, non-strategic expression that arises from genuine integration.
The Soul's Work
When did you last follow something simply because you loved it?
Not because it was developing you. Not because it was serving a larger purpose. Not because it was evidence of your genuine innocence or your spiritual attainment. Simply because you loved it, and the love was enough, and the following was the whole point.
Mary does not carry the lamb to school as a spiritual practice. The lamb follows her to school because she loves it and it loves her and that is the whole story. Rudhyar's teaching is that this — exactly this, no more complicated than this — is what the most developed spiritual beings radiate. Not the lion tamer's authority, not the noble's prerogative, not the basketball team's collective excellence. The lamb that follows because it is loved.
The source material closes with its most luminous question: how love gets from here to there. The answer that the nursery rhyme provides is the simplest possible: Why does the Lamb love Mary so? Because Mary loves the Lamb, you know. Love gets from here to there by being love. The lamb follows because the love is already there.
This is the artlessness that all the development has been aiming toward — not its starting point but its culmination. The lion tamer who can also be Mary. The noble who wears their coat of arms as lightly as Mary carries her lamb. The basketball team that plays with the wide-eyed joy of children who have not yet learned that joy is supposed to be earned.
The Virgo collection at Gamla Healing was made for those who have come far enough to carry it lightly — who know that how love gets from here to there is not through the display of what they've achieved but through the simple, radiant quality of what they genuinely are. Explore the Virgo collection.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Sabian Symbol for Virgo 24°?
The Sabian Symbol for Virgo 24° is Mary and her little lamb, channelled by Elsie Wheeler in 1925 and later interpreted by Dane Rudhyar as an image of the need to keep a vibrant and pure simplicity at the core of one's being — the essential correction after the great developments of the preceding degrees, the quality without which mastery and prerogative become the ego's new form of pride. Jones's keyword is artlessness.
What does Virgo 24° mean in a natal chart?
Having a natal planet at Virgo 24° often indicates a soul with a particular capacity for recovered innocence — the artlessness that is not the absence of development but its culmination. There is frequently a quality of genuine, disarming openness at this placement: the person who has developed greatly and carries it lightly, simultaneously capable of genuine mastery and genuinely at ease in the child's wide-eyed expectation that goodness will arrive.
What is the keyword for Virgo 24°?
The keyword assigned by Marc Edmund Jones is ARTLESSNESS — the specific, recovered, integrated innocence of the developed adult who has retained or reclaimed the child's quality of genuine openness. True artlessness at this degree is not empty-headedness. It is the quality of the person who has been through the lion's cage and the coat of arms and has not allowed either to close the fresh, spontaneous, non-strategic engagement with what is genuinely there.
Why does Rudhyar place this symbol after the lion tamer?
The placement is the teaching. All the great development risks producing the specific inflation Rudhyar warns against: the ego feeding on the drama of struggle and victory, the seeker glamorized by their own successes. Mary and her lamb is the fourth-stage correction: the subtle hint of technique reminding the great achiever that the quality without which achievement becomes pride is not another achievement but the artlessness that was there at the beginning, before the achieving began.
What is the shadow side of Virgo 24°?
Jones identified it as happy-go-lucky vacuity of spirit and understanding — the artlessness that is merely the absence of development rather than its fruit. The innocence Virgo 24° points toward is not the innocence of ignorance but the innocence that has been through the lion's cage and has retained the essential quality of non-grasping. The shadow is the artlessness that has never been tested and therefore carries no genuine weight.
What is Blake's Lamb and Tyger connection to this degree?
Blake's entire poetic project holds both: the Lamb (innocence, artlessness, direct engagement) and the Tyger (experience, power, genuine development). The thirty-fifth Virgo sequence holds both too: the Tyger in the lion tamer's cage at Virgo 23°, the Lamb in Mary's arms at Virgo 24°. Blake's insight — that the fully integrated human consciousness holds both without losing either — is Rudhyar's teaching at this degree.
How does the nursery rhyme's unsung verses illuminate this degree?
The source material attends to the full rhyme, including the verses rarely sung: the lamb turned out of school but waiting patiently near, the children asking why the lamb loves Mary, the teacher's answer — because Mary loves the lamb. The moral is the degree's soul-work: love is a two-way street, the lamb follows not because it is commanded but because it is loved, and how love gets from here to there is through the simple, genuine, non-strategic quality of being genuinely loving.
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.
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