Leo, the Lion: the Power of the Heart

To watch the video for Leo, follow this link:  https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/eurythmy-online/Leo.mp4

Leo, the Sign of Cosmic Will

“Stream through with senses’ power!”

Sidereal dates: 8/17-9//16 Tropical dates: 7/21-8/20

To enter the world of Leo, the sign of the Lion, we can begin by looking back to the beginning of time, back to the very beginning of Creation. Esoteric teachings tell us that the world was created from the God-source, through the self-sacrificing gift of lofty spiritual beings known as the “Thrones.” In devotional contemplation of the Creator, they gave away the gift of their own Will-substance, so that upon its foundation, the thoughts of the Creator could become manifest.

The foundation that they offered was Will, the very essence of their being, which was revealed as pure spirit-warmth. This original, inner spirit-warmth then became externally manifest as World Warmth. And at its core there arose the Heart of the Universe.

From that first beginning, the universe began its evolution. Each stage that followed became more complex, more differentiated. And in evolving through time and space, the original heat became spiritually “cooler,” less vital and alive, more material.

At the periphery of the expanding universe there arose the world of the Senses, the perfect macrocosmic mirror of the original thoughts of the Creator.

The sign of Leo represents in our current universe the sphere of influence of the Thrones. From Leo, there still stream the spiritual forces that create in fire, that culminate in matter. Leo in us speaks of both the living spirit-fire and of the world of the senses, which arose.

Leo and the Human Heart

We human beings are the inheritors of this whole cycle of evolution. We are spiritual beings, living in the world of the senses even as we carry the original spark of spiritual fire in our human heart. The zodiacal sign Leo, the sign of the Lion, demonstrates more clearly than any other sign that, as human beings, we are BOTH center and periphery, both earth and cosmos.

Have we eve sufficiently pondered on the spiritual significance of our warm-blooded nature? Do we realize that this is more than a merely physical phenomenon?

Spirit lives within us, as the fire of creative energy, centered in our heart and pulsing through our blood. And we live in spirit, in the created world of the senses that we take into ourselves as food, and that we affect through our deeds.

The human heart is so much more than what we picture as the four-chambered organ in the chest. We must think of the warm blood that courses through the acres of blood vessels within us, ever touching our inner organs, touching our skin, touching our sense organs, warming our deeds, and then returning to our heart to be rejuvenated by our breath. Warmth, the gift of the world creator, pulses through our blood and enables our spirit to connect itself to matter. Here dwells the power of creative love that can change the world. Here lives the power through that gives birth to the future, through our deeds.

The warm blood of our heart is the bearer of the spirit-ego within us. We plunge into this warmth as spirit beings, “drown” in the blood of substance, and through it touch into the whole world of substance. Through the fire-force of the ego active in the metabolism, we destroy the matter that we eat. Out of its “ashes” in our digestion, we build anew our own inner human substance.

Leo thus reveals the power of the human heart within and also the world of the senses that surround us. We are original spirit fire-beings, living in the enchanted world of Maya, and through the pulsation of our hearts we are connected to both.

The Eurythmy Gesture for Leo

The spiritual attribute of Leo is known as “flaming enthusiasm.” We can feel this embodied when we do the eurythmy gesture for Leo. Before we even begin the movement, we must feel the power of the enthusiastic heart. We feel its longing to taste and touch and engage with the world. Lion-like, we feel our heart forces expand, sending their rays outward, sun-like. The outstretched arms reach into the periphery like spirit-tentacles: their energy goes far beyond our fingertips, and we feel connected to the entire created world that surrounds us.

The Sounds of Leo: T and D

The sign Leo is the home for two consonants: T and D.

The sound T is one of the strongest of all consonants, summoning the power of the universe and focusing it to deliver a strong impact in a single, chosen point. It embodies the power of a bolt of lightning. When we move its power with a eurythmy gesture, we first gather all the power of the surrounding, as we create the largest possible gesture from right and left, below and above. Our fingertips then strike our head at the crown chakra, and the lightning-power of the T through the entire body. Its power is gathered up in the heart, supporting the warmth of our human blood, that sacred substance that is the vessel for the ego in the body.

In the microcosm of the human body, original divine power lives in fire of our blood. By virtue of this fire, the most spiritual of the four elements, our spirit is able to unite with the material world for the duration of our lives. This fire lives in our will, and warms our deeds. It lives in our digestion, and gives us the capacity to digest the material of our food, breaking it down and then building up the cells we need according to our human archetype.

            “Saturn’s cosmic fire is maintained in the blood’s warmth, giving the ego its present footing. In that the blood decomposes to gall in the liver, the ego confronts the world directly, as ingested nutriment, with the T-energy, throws itself with cosmic fire-force in the path of matter, breaks down matter in the metabolic process, and creates its own warmth by transforming every substance back into heat. The warmth spent outwardly is continuously regenerated from within.” Dr. H. Erasmy, Cosmic and Earthly Evolution p. 114

The partner sound of Leo is the D, a duller, unvoiced impact sound. This is the perfect complement to T, for it shows how the fire-force of creation has shone out from the “cosmic sun,” streaming to the very periphery of the world. In so doing, the cosmic creative force has become manifest outwardly. What has it created? Nothing less than the entirety of the world of the senses! Thus, the meditative picture for Leo includes the words “Stream-through with senses might.”

Leo and the Activity of Transformation

When we can enliven these words in our hearts, we can feel the absolute beauty of our human condition. The world of the senses that surrounds us as a Macrocosm is the perfect complement to the sacred Microcosm that lives within us. Macrocosmic Yang and microcosmic Yin are woven together. It is the human heart that holds the key to the middle, the balance between center and periphery, contraction and expansion.

We, as human beings, are only now waking up to the miracle of our existence. We feel the warmth of spirit in the blood-warmth of our hearts. We perceive the created world through the myriad doors of our many sense organs.

Our awakened heart can look into the world: there we see the forces that have made us. And we can look into our hearts, and see the forces that have made the world.

It is then our task, as human beings, to transform that God-given fire that blazes in our heart. Creation has made a “detour” through the human heart, in that we have been inserted with our physical organism into this earth process. What is significant here is what our souls will do with the warmth of the blood.

When we develop true, heart-felt interest in all beings, we link ourselves with all aspects of earth existence. What our souls harvest as living interest will be carried with us through many incarnations as the fire of the spirit.

And doing so, we evolve to be able to take our own place in existence, as earthly-cosmic beings of love.

The Spiritual Power of the Heart

Sometimes it is only in times of duress that we become aware of the majesty of our human condition. I will conclude with statements made by Russian prisoners quoted by Solzhenitsyn in his work Forum 3, Ref.:

“A tremendous power is alive in us….The whole universe is mysteriously bound up with our soul’s depths. Each one of us is the center of the universe….A mysterious inner warmth that seems to us to come from another world keeps us from freezing in the glacial cold….In the innermost depths of the human soul there lies an inexplicable power stronger—empirically, not just symbolically speaking—than all the external forces of suppression and destruction…Anyone who tries to save his life is doomed and brings to naught what his inner voice is trying to help him achieve. But we possess the freedom to decide. “

Click on this link to watch the video for Leo: https://woocommerce-343166-1388959.cloudwaysapps.com/leo-the-lion-the…wer-of-the-heart/ ‎

Color: Blue

Element: Fire

Sounds: T and D

Element of Sounds: Earth

The Heart