Sign: Leo | Sign Ruler: Sun | Decan Ruler: Jupiter Element: Fire | Mode: Fixed
The Sun rules Leo by domicile, while Jupiter rules this decan by face. The two planets are traditionally friendly, combining solar authority with Jupiterian nobility, generosity, and expansion. This creates a face associated with honour, leadership, beauty, and the confident exercise of power. Core Principle: Authority through nobility. Leo II is regal, expansive, and confident. Jupiter’s benefic influence strengthens the solar themes of authority and recognition. The atmosphere is noble and ambitious, balancing beauty and dignity with the readiness to act and command.

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Liber Hermetis “The second decan of Leo has the face of Jupiter. Its name is Zachor. It causes obstructions and abscesses for men. It rules the unknown land.”
Ibn Ezra-Picatrix “In the second face of Leo ascends a man with a crown of white myrtle on his head and a bow in his hand. This is a face of beauty, of riding, and of the rise of ignorant and rude men. It is the face of war and unsheathed swords. This is its form.”

In the dry and dusty deserts of Leo, we rise to meet something that, in the moment, hints at a return to the outward-facing confidence grief had folded away. Here, solar fire meets the expansive nobility of Jupiter, asking whether embracing the new possibilities ahead will undermine our identity. Escaping entrenched beliefs may be difficult; Ibn Ezra declares this a face of war, while Liber Hermetis diagnoses obstruction and weeping sores. From this position, we are challenged cease from the overindulgence of identifying with our past egoistic identities, and to avoid remaining safe in the relative harmony we have so far achieved.

The Golden Dawn assigns this decan to the Six of Wands, traditionally entitled Victory. Given the natural camaraderie between the Sun and Jupiter, we might read this as an easy triumph over opposition, but this decan begs a deeper examination. The symbolism reveals that victors carry weapons, and that unspoken battles precede this moment of adulation.

The figure who presides here is crowned and armed simultaneously. Myrtle symbolises love, used in weddings and funerals alike for millennia; we do not know if this archer is honoured in love or in loss, or if he even is a hero, but the bow he bears projects power across distance, sending intent further than the body can travel. The swords imply a readiness to engage, but also to disengage, as if the unspoken act is the willingness to cut loose, to cauterise the ulcers of overindulgence and to fly like an arrow into the horizon itself.

The unknown land of Leo II is an existential one, beyond the boundary of what we have previously understood about loss, where we disembark from our preconceived ideas about who we were before. Jupiter’s enlarging influence within the Sun’s own kingdom promises that any attempt to enter is noble, for the expansion of our understanding alone is worthy of the myrtle crown. The drawn swords and the inferred obstructions imply that this reach is almost divinatory: the fierce and yearning hunger to illuminate what lies beyond.

The shadow woven into this decan is the presumption that inspiration alone is sufficient and that a quest pursued with devotion will render loss comprehensible. The tradition describes placing obstruction alongside expansion: the unknown land is there to be understood, and the attempt itself is our goal. Turning the fire preserved through suffering, outward into the world with the generosity of our sovereign intelligence, we can employ the unsheathed swords to cut what needs to be relinquished, as we draw the bow, aiming into the future.

As we watch the arrow, already travelling through the air, we gaze towards the horizon, holding its distance as an invitation; it is the unknown land at the edge of the world. We know that the bow is always capable of reaching further than the hand, and that the crown of myrtle, carrying the weight of what was lost within its leaves, is gilded with the promise of victory and the beauty of what loss made visible.