Alan Leo

Born William Frederick Allan in Westminster in 1860, the man the astrological world remembers as Alan Leo did more than perhaps anyone to carry the ancient art into the modern age. Drawn young to the works of Raphael and Zadkiel, he threw himself into study, founded the Astrological Lodge of the Theosophical Society in 1889, launched Modern Astrology magazine the following year, and wrote such works as The Art of Synthesis and Esoteric Astrology. Above all he championed the sun sign as a friendly doorway through which ordinary people might begin to know themselves, and he insisted, against much scorn, that astrology was a path to understanding the whole living cosmos.

How fitting that the Sun should sit in its own royal sign of Leo, at full lion-king strength: the born teacher whose golden heart wanted to hand the light to everyone. Yet that Sun falls in the twelfth house, the unknowable, mystical realm of spirit and the collective unconscious, exactly the esoteric depths he spent his life mapping. His Moon blazed in pioneering Aries in the ninth house of philosophy, religion and higher learning, the very territory of his mission. Leo also rose, lending him the magnetic, torch-holding presence of a man who lit a path others still walk.