The Leo Personality, Here Comes The Sun

Leo is the sign in which PERSONALITY  is developed to the maximum extent.You know when people say “You got personality, kid!” If you retain nothing else about Leo, just remember the word PERSONALITY in all it’s dimensions and meanings. The concept of personality is Leo himself.

Leo can be an artist, but his greatest creation is really himself. It’s more accurate to say he is the preeminent showman of the zodiac; the entertainer.

And by virtue of being the zodiac’s entertainer, Leo lives or dies by applause. He needs approbation for his efforts to have the energy and motivation to continue. In this way he is unlike Aries, another fire sign. Aries doesn’t doesn’t need applause but just requires people to stay out of his way while he explodes forth out of nothingness into a state of BEING and BECOMING.

Leo is the beginning of a zodiacal phase where there is an awareness of other people but they are looked upon as inferiors. Leo feels the spirit coursing through his brawny body and feels like a channel for the divine power. This is in reality what the function of the King archetype is, a physical representation of divine command – ruling with god.

The Leo personality can forget that it is not him who originates this power but that they are a vessel to contain and transmit the holy might. Thus, excess Pride is the sins of the sign. It is no accident that a group of lions is called a pride.

However, the Leo personality can be quite magnanimous when it comes to bestowing favors on his subjects. His tactics are above-board. When he goes to battle, he fights fairly and with honor. This distinguishes him from Scorpio, another sign of power (Note: The four fixed signs of the zodiac are the signs of power)

In addition to being such a nice king, the deeper layer of Leo is really that he is the divine child of the sun. And really, all his downsides could be looked at as Leo just being a CHILD AT PLAY.

Work?

Yeah, Leo’s don’t really work so much as PLAY. Leo is the generalist par excellence. Broad strokes are the province of this fellow. Leos abhor details and meticulousness. By contrast, the zodiac sign of Virgo is THE SPECIALIST.

Depending on the Myers-Briggs personality type wielding the sign of Leo, we will see different degrees of their propensity for PLAY, but assuming that we have a somewhat extraverted and thinking type of personality behind the Leo sign, we might expect Leo to abound in the field of market speculation, where they relish the idea of using their intuition to outsmart the market. The appeal of this to Leo is that they probaly wouldn’t have a boss, and they could live or die by their own judgements. This hints at them being ideal entrepreneurial types too. Much of this does depend on the Myers-Briggs type of the Leo person (This is true with any of the zodiac signs).

Leos are generally bright and quick in the uptake. They get the knack of how to do things quickly, whether it is learning a spiritual system or a way to obtain riches, or even balancing their checkbooks, they are going to get to the heart of the matter quickly.

Speaking of which, Leo rules the heart.  They intuit their way into situations without a lot of formal training,  acting the part. Leo understands acting very well. Fake it til you make it.

Assuming we are dealing with an extravert, the Leo personality likes to move around town associating with people who can make things happen. Being the talk of the town cheers them up! The dream of how all their magnificent exploits will be marveled at is the tonic of this creature that dreads being small and insignificant.

The Leo personality is the warmest in the zodiac with a gigantic heart of gold. They are prejudiced like Cancer . They have their favorites, then on the other hand,  the ones they absolutely detest. Either way their passions and antipathies are writ large and they are not shy about sharing them either. They will sing the praises of those that fill them with life and attack and bully the ones who remind them of the pettiness of life (like ISTJ’s.)

Leo hates pettiness more than anything. People that nitpick and make mountains out of molehills irritate their gregarious sun-filled spirits. Anything that debases and sullies the spirit, dragging it into a bureaucratic and regimented world of minutia angers the lion. Leo does not like to be reminded of the muck and the underside of nature (hint at their conflict with Scorpio). They prefer the sovereignty of spirit, dwelling in the realm of Camelot. They don’t want to be reminded that the knights of olden days were often not in noble or venerable circumstances and that they slept on beds of straw. Anything that destroys the myth that Leo upholds in their imagination is bad.

The Leo personality sees situations very much in terms of good versus evil and he is always on the side of the good and the noble. Life is like a fairytale to him (this is a hint as to why Neptune is exalted in Leo). He makes dragons out of teachers that he doesn’t like and princesses out of women that he pines for. He has trouble seeing the real world and the baseness in it. Leo wears rose-colored glasses, believing everything will work out in his favor in the end. He is the divine child, most favored by Fortune.

To Leo, a deed of valor is the only one worth committing. He is not capable of consciously acting underhanded but this is also the reason why Leo can have a shadow the size of Texas: they do not want to know the darkness, only to fight the denizens it harbors. Because of this repression of the dark side, Leo often has trouble seeing how they act tyrannically, pouncing on and belittling people that they see under the spell of wickedness. Their opinion is the only one that counts in these matters, and no one better dare try to correct them. It’s that Leo pride again. Leo can’t bear to be wrong. Plus, they just consider everyone their inferiors.

Leo keenly feels the call towards individuation. All the fire signs (Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius) have this need for the quest. In Leo and Aries, the search for the Self is most pronounced. By contrast, the fire sign Sagittarius is more specifically searching for God and the meaning of life for all humanity, though Sagittarius can even bypass Leo’s position as the supreme egotist if they become THE GURU, which can be a similar trip to Leo being THE KING, except that Sagittarius can be like being GOD himself. That’s fire signs for ya! Keep it big and larger-than-life!

Yes, Leo has a need need to mythologize his life, to see his life as a hero’s journey.

If the Leo personality does not heed the call he becomes a very lifeless creature indeed. They have a larger mission they want to devote their life to but it all comes back to self-discovery. The hum-drum everyday grind is a death knell to the lion-hearted creature. Leo, more than any other sign, must follow his heart. As Joseph Campbell says, “Follow your bliss.” Campbell’s book The Hero With A Thousand Faces would be revelatory to the Leo native because the lion most embodies the hero archetype as well as the King.

Question to Readers

What if the Leo native is an ISTJ or ISFJ? Because this description of Leo is definitely written with decided intuitive bias. I mean, it’s obvious from the foregoing description that Leo is decidedly on the intuitive side of the spectrum, against introverted sensation, and definitely extraverted. I would say the Myers-Briggs types that most correspond with this description of Leo are ENFJ, ENFP, ENTJ, and ENTP, roughly in that order: The EXTRAVERTED INTUITIVE types. But there are introverted Leos, and even introverted sensation type Leos. What do their lives look like?

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Featured Photo Credit: Clement Bardo (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en