Welcome to Leo season! The one and only fixed fire sign is ruled by the Sun itself. Much like that celestial body, Leo is bright, alluring, and potentially deadly to any moth-like supplicants who flutter too close to its flame.
Stereotypically, Leo catches a lot of flak for being a diva, an attention lover, and basically the Miss Piggy personality of the Muppet zodiac. But that’s a surface-level understanding of the sign, informed largely by the extravagance of its most Madonna-esque members. The real defining characteristic of Leo is steadfast self-certainty, perhaps especially during periods of instability and doubt. Even the most self-effacing Leo’s spirit burns around a core of confidence. If envious naysayers misinterpret that quality as a sign of conceit, that’s their problem. Leo will always follow the direction of their own internal compass, propelled by their own personal motivations.
For all signs, Leo season is a welcome respite from the heavy emotional drenching that characterized the preceding weeks with Cancer. Trouble won’t instantly vanish when the Sun arrives in Leo, but your feelings about any ongoing woes may change significantly. Entering Leo season is like reaching that point in an argument when your perspective snaps from an anxious “how can I rephrase to explain myself better?” to an angry “do you REALIZE WHO YOU ARE TALKING TO?!”
Individuals of all zodiac signs celebrate Leo season by suddenly refusing to suffer bullshit, which is fortunate because another side effect of the Lion’s month is a petty compulsion to start some bullshit of your own. May your fights be plot-furthering and your melodrama memorable this month, everyone! Let’s get into what the season holds in store for each sign below.
Click here to jump to a sign: Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer.
You’re set to blaze into your own season on the momentum of the quick-witted social butterfly Mercury, which will shine on your sign for the first week and a half. At the end of July, the New Moon in your constellation provides an opportunity for a psychological reset. Then, the Sun’s position in relation to lucky Jupiter sets an auspicious stage for fresh endeavors. These conditions bode well for success but don’t necessarily indicate that the process will be easy.
Over the same weekend, Mercury squares off with the North Node and Uranus (astrological representatives of personal growth and progress, respectively) and moves fully into opposition with Saturn, (planet of authority and responsibility). Basically: your first Leo season July weekend is scheduled to be a party, and the second a possibly painful but ultimately productive power play.
The latter half of your season is themed around love, as Venus moves into your space during the second week of August. Venus isn’t always about romantic love — its presence in a chart can indicate matters of aesthetics, personal interests, or pretty much anything to do with pleasure — but in this particular instance, the planet is casting a pulsing, pink sex-in-the-club kind of light. If that’s not your thing, you may want to hide in your home temporarily lest stricken suitors embarrass you by falling at your feet in public. But if you delight in the heat of carnal attraction, enjoy! It’s your season, after all; any hormone-fueled emotional bonds will either blow up or adapt themselves to fit mundane reality once the Sun moves into Virgo.
At the turn of August, the Moon graces your sign. Just past full, it will line up in resistant opposition to Neptune, the planet of ideals and intuition, but will also form friendly, propitious patterns with Venus, Mars, Uranus, and Pluto. This looks like a situation in which you need to get out of your own way. You may feel like your intuition is failing you, but that’s because you aren’t truly trusting your instincts, and instead attempting to force them in a direction you’ve already decided.
In this case, fortunately, nearly every other astrological influence you could ask for is lining up to cooperate with your innermost needs and desires. If you can take the terrifying step of simply relaxing your grip on whatever you’ve convinced yourself you wanted, you should be able to clearly determine how to proceed.
A few days later, your sign ruler Mercury zooms into your constellation from Leo. You thrive on this energy — thinking fast, talking fast, walking fast, getting shit done! Mercury’s going to snag your sign and haul ass all the way into your own season this summer. Have fun! If all goes as scheduled, you’re set to have your proverbial house tidy as hell by the time the Sun arrives to visit in late August.
In early August, the Moon moves through your sign, making a complicated set of patterns with the other astrological bodies as it does. To loosely interpret the aspects and elements at work, it appears that while your professional life will be fine — maybe even actively improving — you might encounter conflict in your romantic situation, most likely due to issues of stagnation.
The following week, however, your ruler Venus moves into Leo’s territory, which in turn will impart some of that Leo energy onto you. If you’ve been plagued by wishy-washiness lately, that’ll go straight out the window. You’ll feel a healthy urge toward self-prioritization: listen to that feeling, and then act on it.
Existing as a Scorpio in Leo season is an aggravatingly enjoyable situation. It’s like going on a daytime hike in your most-layered goth-fit: you low-key wanted to have a bad time and therefore feel irritated when your favorite woodland flower is in bloom because goddamn it, it’s beautiful. And all those other people on the trail with you are wearing appropriate outdoor clothing and they’re enjoying themselves, too, and it’s just awful.
Stereotypically speaking, Leo irritates Scorpio because that never-ending flame of self-surety at Leo’s core (as opposed to the howling void buried deep inside of Scorp) can be both beguiling and frightening. Nothing threatens a Scorpio’s innate sense of dogma like lack of respect for The Void, and Leos don’t even recognize it! Sunlit Leo walks around as if they’ve never even dreamed of losing their own sense of self inside an endless chasm! To Scorpio, that’s awe-inspiring and even a little bit inspirational, which again incites some irritation. So that’s the general mood of Scorpio’s month.
The first Saturday in August is slated to be a good day for Scorps: the waxing gibbous Moon is scheduled to make happy patterns with the representatives of love, inspiration, and reinvention. Remain wary lest you end up making cartoonish wolf howls at a Leo when Venus hits their sign only days later.
I know a set of Sagittarian twins. When they were kids, they liked to kick a ball back and forth not to but past each other, increasing distance with each pass so whoever was on the retrieving side had to run for the object, then turn to punt it back even further. They’d do that for hours, alternately ebullient and angry, until the distance of their kicks lessened as their strength waned, forcing them to run back closer together to restart the game. Sometimes they’d play until they collapsed, lying on the ground panting until the energy to run and kick returned (at which point, of course, they’d start playing again).
That dynamic demonstrates the way Sagittarians interact not only with each other, but with any other fire sign who is game to play. Whether it stems from genuine rest and refreshment or a wild fatigue-driven compulsion to motion, every Sagittarius will feel a surge of energy at the commencement of Leo season. None of you will stop metaphorically running back and forth and kicking shit until Virgo season arrives to force y’all to sit down.
Pluto is still in your constellation, still retrograde. That won’t change for months yet, so appreciate its thoughtful, ponderous retrospective spin back over the landscape of your life’s work until it reverses course in autumn.
You were blessed with the full moon of Cancer season, and this month you’ll be lit by the not-quite-full but still bright beam of its waxing gibbous phase. In conjunction with Pluto (and a favorable arrangement with Mercury, Mars, Uranus, and Neptune), the Moon should conspire to help you complete a current work project and begin charting the course for the next. A square aspect with Jupiter and opposition with Venus may render you unlucky in love during this period, but if you’re partnered with (or hoping to hook up with) a Leo in mid-August, their favorable fortune should cancel out your potential passion problems.
You’re due for a vertigo-inducing moment in mid-August when your subconscious uncharacteristically cries out for the rigidity of structure. Saturn, your sign’s ancient ruler and modern estranged authority figure, is in your constellation and still moving retrograde. This is no particular trouble to a contemporary Aquarius, as y’all are already programmed to be cautious and question those in power. When the Moon moves into conjunction with Saturn — simultaneously shunning innovative Uranus, assertive Mars, and the life-fueling Sun itself — you may feel as if all of the oxygen has spontaneously combusted out of your usual airy state.
If you need to spend a bit of time in the earth, rather than flying free and unbounded above the soil, please remember it’s not a tragic downfall. Capricorns live this way all the time! The presence of Venus in your sibling constellation Leo might not do much for your love life, but should reignite your passion for your own particular curiosities following the rough patch.
If you’ve been keeping up with previous installments in this column, Pisces, you know that you’ve been coping with a funky forecast for a few weeks now. Neptune, your sign’s ruler and signifier of spiritual concerns, is at home in your constellation! However, its retrograde movement, which will last through the end of the year, poses a complication.
The retrograde movement of planets in the solar system relative to Earth is actually an illusion. Neptune isn’t really spinning backwards across the night sky; it’s a trick of positioning and speed. Astrologically, however, the effects of retrograde are still typically considered disruptive. In your case, Neptune’s moonwalk doesn’t mean it’s dragging its figurative soles back over you wreaking havoc on your previous gains. It’s more like you’re passing a slower vehicle on the left, moving faster than the big blue orb of intuition can keep up. That’s called growth, and it’s great! (Even though it feels like shit in the moment.)
The waning Moon in your sign in mid-August is set to compliment this interpretation, even forming a friendly conjunction with Neptune itself. Slow down for a moment, and let your spirit swell to refill the stretch of your growth.
You’re still hosting huge, luck-bestowing Jupiter. (Have you seen those James Webb telescope image? Ahhhh!!). It’s still retrograde in your constellation, which fortunately is not that bad when it comes to Jupiter. The planet’s beneficent effects might not be as great as they are when the planet is moving prograde, but astrologically speaking, Jupiter is never really out to fuck you up.
What’s a little more worrisome here is tiny Chiron, the outer solar system centaur and astrological representative of wounding and healing. Having gone retrograde just prior to the start of Leo season, Chiron’s current movement may find you more inclined to the rip open a poorly stitched wound than you are to let a trauma continue to heal.
Everything the Moon does in your sign this month works to further this hurting-to-heal-properly process, including a square aspect with Pluto which tells you to sit your ass down. You can’t — or rather, you shouldn’t — leap forward into the next major cycle of your life without addressing previous injury first.
Your constellation’s got custody of oddball Uranus this season. You’re also hosting the North Node— that’s the calculated point at which the Moon’s orbit crosses through and “above” the path of the Sun before eventually descending “below” via the South Node half a year later. Astrologically, the North Node is about fate, destiny, and the vision of the eventual person you are constantly striving to become. The South Node, which always falls in the opposite sign (in this case, Scorpio) represents your past.
Congratulations! With the North Node astrologically rubbing up against Uranus, the planet of weirdness, you’re scheduled for a period of bizarre personal transformation!
At the end of July, Mercury (in Leo) squares off against both Uranus and the North Node: expect some inconvenient turbulence in The Great Project Of Becoming Yourself at that time. The disturbance itself should be brief, passing as you cross the temporal border into August, but its effects will shape your continuing journey.
For most of Leo season 2022, Gemini’s just vibing. Venus left you for Cancer near the conclusion of Cancer’s season. No other major astrological bodies are hanging around in your constellation, and none of the planets are flirting or fighting in your vicinity. You’re unsupervised! Time to party! Or to take a nap? Both. Hell, take a whole road trip. Your astrological sky is clear until the third weekend in August.
As Leo season draws to its grand finale, Mars notices you looking lonely and comes over to egg you on in whatever pursuit you’re up to by that time, jeering, cheering, and supporting you in its own pushy way. At the same time, the waning crescent Moon passes by to see what you’re up to. With it, the Moon brings passive approval from Jupiter, Venus, and the Sun, a big “hell yeah!” from Saturn, but also some snarky angular resistance from Neptune and Mercury, who aren’t on board with the direction you’re currently taking. Don’t heed the first and eighth planets’ critiques if they’re bullshit, but if they do make some solid points, consider changing course upon entering Virgo season.
Cancer’s late July is lookin’ like an HBO drama, the type that spawns Tumblr GIFs of kissing scenes and close-up angsty facial acting.
You’re stepping into the season hand-in-hand with both Venus (deity of romance, lover of drama) and Lilith (your shadow self, your baser nature). It’s like you’re standing between the pink and black houses! And then near the end of July, Venus moves into a conjunction with Lilith — now they’re dating!!! Strong pastel gf/goth gf energy here; they are having a torrid affair and you’re sandwiched in the middle. Venus is the top, and Lilith is the bossy brat who’s gonna make things weird.
You may feel overwhelming urges to make objectively poor romantic decisions while this is happening. It’s one of those situations that’s going to leave you in pain regardless: you’ll pine if you try to avoid it, but you know indulging will end badly even though it feels so good in the present. But even if it hurts, damn if it will feel cinematic!
In the second week of August, Venus abandons you for Leo. Go ahead and preemptively stock up on some empty notebooks and art supplies, or tune your guitar or whatever. This patch won’t feel great, I’m not going to lie, but you will be perfectly primed to channel your emotions into artwork.
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