Leo Solar Eclipse 2026

Wednesday, 12 August 2026 – Total Solar Eclipse / New Moon in Leo 18:36 BST
Wednesday, 12 August 2026 – Mercury sextile Uranus
Thursday, 13 August 2026 – Mercury sextile Venus
Saturday, 15 August 2026 – Mercury conjunct Jupiter
Monday, 17 August 2026 – Mars square Neptune
Monday, 17 August 2026 – Mercury trine Saturn
Monday, 17 August 2026 – Venus sextile Jupiter
Friday, 21 August 2026 – Venus opposite Saturn
Sunday, 23 August 2026 – Sun into Virgo
Tuesday, 25 August 2026 – Mercury into Virgo
Thursday, 27 August 2026 – Sun conjunct Mercury
Friday, 28 August 2026 – Mercury square Uranus
Friday, 28 August 2026 – Full Moon / Partial Lunar Eclipse in Pisces 05:18 BST

To learn more about how this new moon will affect you, follow this link to sovereigbeing.co.uk

We have a Solar Eclipse in Leo on 12 August 2026 at 18:38 BST.

This eclipse has substantial Pluto involvement and with Pluto strongly implicated in the eclipse itself, the question of power is not background material here; it belongs to the eclipse. Eclipses also ask something of our relationship with uncertainty. We are often quick to decide what something means before it has even unfolded, perhaps because certainty is easier to tolerate than leaving the meaning unresolved.

Over the last few days, in the wake of the Steven Forrest controversy, which I am assuming readers are already familiar with, it has become very clear to me that astrologers need to become accustomed to standing before what they do not yet understand, being in the uncertainty, and resisting the rush towards interpretation or the need to immediately make their stance known.

We are now clearly in territory where we are learning what happens when collective power gathers enough momentum that the individuals participating in it or even exercising it, or feel at teh victim of it, are no longer recognising themselves as powerful. That goes for all sides.

I have also heard calls to put the conversation to rest so that people can move on and heal. Yet perhaps our desire for resolution or closure needs examination too. We often want difficult events to become understandable and complete within a timeframe we can tolerate, when their deeper significance may only become apparent through continuing to live with the questions they have opened.

There has already been a great deal written about Pluto in Aquarius, the South Node in Leo and the total solar eclipse on 12 August. Much of it shares a common theme: the old authorities are falling and the collective is rising, with Leo cast as the past and Aquarius as the future.

It is an attractive narrative, and I find myself wondering whether it risks becoming another rising binary of its own. Old Leo authority bad, Aquarian community good. Have astrologers’ seemingly gone blind to the fact that Pluto’s location signifies power?

So yes, the Pluto in Leo generation, well into their 70s now, have done their job well, of concentrating and consolidating power in the individual. The charismatic guru, the widely published astrologer, the celebrity, the lawyer, the psychiatrist or the recognised expert: any individual really whose position can grant them considerable authority over other people, sometimes with remarkably little scrutiny of the power attached to that role.

And we have all at times in our lives invested in their subjective opinion. We have been seeing for a while now that individuals on pedestals become insulated by the system or institutional power structures they belong to, or cling to. But it is far too easy to place the shadow within Leo—to say that the individual is the problem itself.

It is also the case that the individual has become an abstraction in our world: we increasingly encounter people through the categories they represent rather than through their irreducible humanity. And despite what many people seem to think, categories and identities are not people.

Labels might represent an aspect of reality—patriarchy, privilege, the expert, etc.—but they are not the whole picture, and if we take a person away from their intent or the wider context, we take out the complexity. For most people, complexity is either inconvenient or just difficult to tolerate. Why is this, we should ask? The deeper question is important.

You see, an individual caught up in a collective process or response tends to stop being a person and starts being a symbol of something. What we are currently navigating is that we ourselves construct our own versions of the people out there—be it a mother killer who’s a monster or a victim, a racist white male astrologer or an old, clueless man, there are many for us to choose from. Either way though, whatever we construct will depend on what we trust.

So we individually or a group can reach a shared ‘verdict’ and act on it without ever working out the deeper layers of complexity and truth. The certainty that forms within us or at the group level often sits on top of real conflict, seemingly irreconcilable differences, tension that was never actually resolved or even can be resolved at the individual level. Sometimes things, realities, people coexist, but cannot come together.

It’s the case that we either we can never fully know the truth and we either claim or submit to that, or we just go along with our supericical ideas about something without truly investing in the deeper understanding, or we simply get outvoted, or feel silenced by the majority once the group’s response is clear or believe we know it all. I’m sure there’s other options also.

But perhaps a massive part of the human condition in this timeframe is our learning to live with uncertainty, incongruence and several levels of reality being true at once, without forcing them prematurely into a single explanation. What appears true at the personal, psychological or social level may remain entirely valid, while time reveals another deeper or higher dimension of meaning we could not have seen from where we were standing. Our task may be to remain open enough for that deeper understanding, even the miraculous, to emerge without using it to erase the realities that were already there.

So a group can be entirely right that harm occurred, and relate to the person who caused it as an abstraction. If a group’s attention is organised around what something ‘represents’, then the real human being who has feelings becomes someone to blame—and everything about them that doesn’t fit the category simply falls out of view.

While that might not feel like dehumanisation in the ordinary sense, especially from inside a group or a fixed mindset, it still involves a failure to recognise the person in their full humanity. There is a real, feeling, relating person in front of us—a human being with a soul, capable of crying in pain—and that is easy to forget once judgement has set in. This doesn’t become irrelevant because they cause harm. If someone still reaches for excuses at this point—“they brought it on themselves,” “they know what they need to do,” “karma,” “they gave away their humanity when they made that choice”—then the deeper issue, for me, lies with those who can no longer see the human being in front of them.

This is perhaps the clearest form that the Aquarian shadow can take. Aquarius, at its best, can see the pattern, the system, the wider view. But Aquarius’s shadow is precisely the loss of that particularity, that 1984 moment: the moment a person stops being someone and starts being something.

A case, a controversy, a diagnosis—all stand in for something bigger than the people carrying this themselves. We believe that people ‘choose’ these roles or service themselves, and I suspect at some level they do, but we also need to not lose sight of what we as individuals or as a collective place on them, through our own ignorance, weakness, shame, guilt and powerlessness.

So while Pluto in Aquarius will concentrate power through the group, there will still be a leader and a follower within a group, there will still be consensus, hierarchy, an expected way of showing up, an ideology, individual sacrifice in order to belong, social exclusion and ostracism, reputational power and, of course, collective judgement. Aquarius can become highly certain of the righteousness of the collective idea.

Aquarius itself is far more complex than the word collective suggests. Its deeper territory is the relationship between the individual and the group: how much individuality a group can tolerate, how much influence the group exerts over its members, and what happens when dissent begins to threaten the shared position. Pluto entering that territory intensifies the question of power on both sides of that relationship.

So to help it land for you, the question is, can we occupy more than two places, moving towards a transformative third place? Can we do this rather than cling to one possibility of a binary, each of which cancels the other out?

We must also ask what happens when authority—be it the psychiatrist, the court of law, the MP, Big Pharma, the convener of a conference—hands down consequences while remaining itself unaccountable. Who decides what constitutes appropriate consequence, and through what process? What protects an individual from a disproportionate collectively driven punishment, and are we even able to disagree once judgement has been formed? Is there any real distinction between correction, sanction, ostracism and the destruction of a reputation? These are some of the questions that sit in the unexplored territory of what ethical Aquarian power actually looks like.

A massively decentralised group, such as the mainstream populace, is still capable of exercising enormous power, as it did during Covid and other times. Often it can harbour more power than a formal institution, simply because its authority is diffuse and not in one place—there may be no identifiable person responsible for what happens. Responsibility becomes so widely distributed that nobody appears to be exercising authority, even though power and authority are clearly operating.

If responsibility and accountability continue to reveal themselves as more distributed across a system than in one concentrated, identifiable place, then we are in new, uncharted territory. This is what you would expect from Pluto in Aquarius, and all the other changing planets. And that space, currently rather vague and undefined, will continue to get populated by the populace—who form the verdict, assign blame, and exert pressure upon those who ultimately make the decisions.

I know this territory through my personal experience, and this is why I can talk about this and ask these questions.

I have my own lived experience of ostracism from community, it has happened around four times, all in different ways, learning different expressions of that word ‘ostracism’. I won’t go into the details here, as it is deeply personal, but it has been a repeating pattern across my life, and one that sits at the heart of carrying a Chiron ascendant. That history is part of why I feel able to write about these questions from somewhere other than ideas alone. I have the experience, I know how it feels, and I understand the complexity and it spans many, many years.

On top of that, as part of my ten year psychotherapy training, I was fortunate enough to study anti-racism extensively through reading and group processes. That’s a ten-year close-up of understanding both the ideas themselves and the dynamics that emerge when it is applied within groups.

However, towards the end of my training, I had several intense and unusual experiences, two of which I will share. One smaller one involved a younger female peer who, after attending a racism seminar the previous week, arrived at our small peer group in distress and floods of tears, convinced she was racist, although none of us could establish what she was basing this on, other than that she was told she was racist. By the following week peer group session she had shaved off her long hair and committed herself to fighting racism; the intensity and speed of this transformation deeply troubled me. And I knew hair, particularly for women, was a way of sensing the surrounding environment, which made her decision to cut it off especially significant to me.

Another experience involved what I can only describe as a profoundly dark, silencing force in a racism group process room, making itself known through my body to the extent that I could barely move. I did question at the time whether what I was experiencing was the force of racism itself, but that did not correspond with what I was perceiving. The process itself was continually recycling pain without moving anywhere, and I experienced the darkness as connected to the ideology itself, driving that stuck recirculation process rather than to racism itself. This was something we saw a lot, but it was the first time it was palable in my body, other than of course just feeling like I couldn’t speak.

From that point on, internally, I began to seriously question whether the anti-racism ideology I had studied for ten years was actually serving Black people in the way it claimed to. I became increasingly concerned that an ideology intended to address this history might actually keep people unknowingly bound to an inherited identity of oppression.

Of course I was working in many other ways also. My clients connected with enslaved ancestors (which were always far more intense than past lives of slavery). My encounters with the legacy of slavery were profoundly visceral; I felt it alongside my clients, through my Chiron ascendant. I can honestly say that, in everything I have encountered through this path and my client work, nothing compares with the sheer visceral weight of enslavement; the witch killings came close in intensity, but touched a very different level. Accessing these traumas changed my understanding of what it means to lose both human freedom and our connection to Divine spirit.

And so further experiences followed, leading me through a series of breadcrumbs, and by the end of 2020, I could no longer ignore the emerging questions surrounding the deeper assumptions of anti-racism ideology itself. Yet there was no space within the training to voice this; questioning the framework itself was effectively forbidden and came with considerable personal and professional risk.

I’m sharing this because it changed how I understood the relationship between individual and collective power. Yes, power is still exercised by individuals within a group, but when those individuals share the same beliefs and reinforce one another’s authority, it can become impossible to question what is happening.

And so the absence of a single figure directing an outcome (Leo) does not mean the absence of authority or structure. Power may already be distributed through institutions and individuals whose roles become harder to see precisely because the eventual decision is described as the response of “the community.”

This is worth being precise about in the astrological community’s own controversy around Steven Forrest. It was not that no one made a decision—a body of people in a position of authority, UAC in this case, chose a response. But they were under the pressure of a judgement forming in the wider populace. If we ever hear a choice described as “the community responding”, we should ask whether that language allows decision-makers to evade responsibility and borrow the anonymity of the crowd.

If Pluto in Aquarius is asking anything of us here, it may be this: to stop letting collective language dissolve individual responsibility, and to ask who actually held the pen—and whether they can stand behind that decision, rather than pointing outward to a verdict they had already joined. Metabolising the pressure internally is very important. As opposed to reacting to it.

We also need to watch out for asymmetry around shadow. I have read copious amounts about Forrest’s unconscious shadow material being subjected to intense cross examination, while the unconscious material operating within the people examining him receives considerably less attention.

That is important. If we truly invoke Jungian shadow seriously, nobody gets to occupy the position of the person who has transcended shadow and can therefore identify everybody else’s. The accused has a shadow. The accuser has a shadow. The institution has a shadow. The marginalised group has a shadow. The reformer has a shadow. The community has a shadow. The recurring assumption is that collective action is inherently morally superior.

Power doesn’t stop being power—or potentially misused power—just because it names its own purpose as “accountability”. In fact, often quite the opposite. The word ‘accountability’ can become a perfect facade, we see this all the time. Now, if we believe concentrated individual power requires accountability, why would concentrated collective power require any less?

Also, this word “accountability” gets over used constantly, yet I rarely hear anyone defining it. Who determines when it has been ‘achieved’, especially in a situation where responsibility is spread and no single individual is fully identifiable? When does it end? Seemingly never, with some issues. When does it move into the realm of punishment or public purification, or forcing others to carry the shadow that another person or group refuses to face? These are deeply Plutonian questions.

The deeper question, for me, is whether we can learn to see power itself clearly, regardless of who holds it or what banner it operates under, including power we agree with, or power that claims only to be correcting someone else’s. That is much harder than simply spotting power in the hands of people we already distrust.

And there is another question beneath all of this: what actually changes when someone is pressured into adopting the accepted position? A person may apologise, repeat the accepted language or publicly change their position because the social consequences of not doing so have become too great, but that does not necessarily mean their understanding or consciousness has changed.

There is something deeply troubling about demanding an apology or explanation from someone under immense social pressure, and then treating their mistakes, uncertainty or even compliance as evidence that the judgement was correct. And of course, there is never ‘enough awareness’, ‘enough caution’ or ‘enough research’, because once blame has organised the enquiry, almost any response can be absorbed back into the accusation. At this point, we are no longer making greater understanding possible; we have created a position from which the person cannot meaningfully respond.

Non compliance is evidence too: the person is said to be defensive, resistant, unwilling to take accountability and this only furthers the original accusation. It creates a double bind with something of the old witch trials about it—you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I expect we are processing this collectively too. So crowds are not just cruel (although they can be); rather it is that the system of interpretation can become self-confirming.

Yet the danger becomes greater when a community begins to believe that it can reliably discern who is authentic, who is morally compromised and who deserves to belong. With disagreement working against self, we enter into the realm of madness. Under these conditions most people capitulate or defensively fight back, and either response can be profoundly traumatic, leaving wounds that reach deeply into the soul and alter a person’s relationship with themselves and with others.

I should also state that naming the catch 22 is also pretty pointless. The shift needs to happen within the whole field or system, as these are collective issues. It’s not safe for individuals to name these issues. I have experienced that personally and can testify to that.

There is yet another blind spot, this time around the Leo-Aquarius nodal axis. If we interpret the Leo South Node simply as “get rid of Leo” and the North Node as “become Aquarius,” we fail to understand the complexity of the nodes.

The South Node doesn’t necessarily mean the qualities of its sign are negative. It can indicate capacities that are deeply familiar or established and therefore need to be consciously reworked, but also deep golden gifts. And the North Node isn’t automatically positive—it has immature expressions as well. The developmental task for us is to bring mature Leo into relationship with mature Aquarius. I would say the mature Leo is far more available to us right now, as we are at the start of the Pluto in Aquarius era.

And there is an irony in treating Leo itself as the problem, because the eclipse itself is in Leo. While Leo is often inflated individual authority, it also speaks to heart, courage, creative individuality and the capacity to answer from oneself. Chesney Hawkes’ “The One and Only” with a Leo South Node, is almost a perfect expression of that Leo-Aquarius axis. Incidentally, he reportedly spent years resenting being defined by the song, before later recognising what it had come to mean to so many people: the individual expression becoming meaningful to the collective. I didn’t love Chesney in my youth, I thought, correctly, that he was inflated. But I love him now. As Leo contributes to the individual that says, “even if everybody around me believes this, I must answer from and for myself.” Which Chesney in the end did.

Aquarius resists the monopolisation of authority by one charismatic figure. Without Aquarius, Leo is the king who cannot be questioned. Without Leo, Aquarius is the crowd in which nobody takes personal responsibility. But mature Aquarius is not the dissolution of individuality into the group at all. A genuinely wise, Aquarian group may depend upon individuals remaining fully that—individuals—which includes those fully prepared to have it out and disagree.

We must also be careful around inherited ancestry here. Astrologically if we have a Moon square Pluto for example, there will be deep issues within the mother female line. How responsible are we for these? Does our lineage implicate us or get us off the hook? It can bring in a responsibility yes. But I believe we often need to tell the ancestors to back the hell off—from our Divine presence of course. Our ancestry is part of what we inherit, but sovereignty means that neither our lineage nor its karma gets to determine who we are, what we believe or how we live. Others should refrain from putting us in that box as much as we should be mindful how much we are playing out our ancestors.

At one level, Steven Forrest did not choose his ancestor. At another level—in the sense that a soul may choose before incarnating where he’s born into—we could argue he did. Yet that logic can be applied another way, since souls often incarnate into a family to transform what came before them. So the presence of a difficult ancestor could equally support the opposite conclusion, if we look at things from a different dimension. The problem arises when we mistake one dimension of reality for the whole and become self-righteous that our interpretation is the truth.

But regardless, rhetorically his ancestry has become evidence to some people. We must pause—we can turn someone’s genealogy into a moral verdict on who they are, this is guilt by descent rather than accountability for anything they actually did. At the same time, Steven’s lack of awareness, is ‘interesting’. I do not take anything at face value.

People in positions of considerable influence can also use that influence deliberately to divide, manipulate or provoke, sometimes for purposes that are far darker than their public role suggests. Forrest did this during covid making outlandish statements about the unvaxxed, perhaps he regrets that now. So I am saying that possibility belongs in the enquiry too.

Now who, truly, is curious about all these questions? Who can suspend their own beliefs somewhat to allow for other truths to arise? And who is more interested in being right about their own beliefs? And if a powerful, revered individual, the collective or the system spoke, would you be be afraid to question?

So the Leo South Node could be interpreted more interestingly as asking: What is my relationship to what I inherited? What have we inherited concerning Leo? Individual authority, leadership, personal importance, recognition, our right to be at the centre, and our relationship with powerful individuals?

I want to add a more technical layer here as it puts a deeper layer of what we are moving through collectively and it also involves Pluto. Pluto also has something called a declination (thanks for Rosie Finn’s work)—how far north or south it travels from the celestial equator. That’s two different expressions—north and south. At a certain point in either direction, it will go “out-of-bounds”, so it can go out-of-bounds north or south. This is like Pluto moving beyond it’s the usual limits. This expression of Pluto coincides with forces that have been developing over many generations, and during the out of bounds period, it reaches its most extreme and consequential form.

In this declination cycle, North Pluto out-of-bounds was 1938-53, and South Pluto out-of-bounds has just begun spanning 2025-2035. Importantly, this will be the final out-of-bounds passage Pluto completes for many thousands of years, because the changing geometry of Pluto’s orbit means it will no longer reach beyond the Sun’s maximum declination. We are therefore living through the closing phase of an astronomical cycle. This is massive.

North out-of-bounds Pluto correlates with the concentration and abuse of power through tyrants, empires and authoritarian rule. Between 1938 and 1953, this coincided with the Second World War and the reorganisation of global power whose structures we largely inherited. But this period also belongs within a much longer history that includes slavery and racial hierarchy; Nazi Germany represents another horrific extreme of the use of ancestry and race to determine human worth, rights and ultimately who was entitled to freedom and life.

Now Pluto has only just begun crossing into the matching territory on the opposite southern side, for the first time since that previous window ending in 1953. It will travel south between 2025 and 2035, for certain months of each of those years. Pluto out of bounds to the south is very different and correlates with that power being challenged from below through revolution, rebellion and reform—very Aquarius, isn’t it. But it’s still Pluto… it’s still about power.

This final act of Pluto out-of-bounds to the south for thousands of years is like a return visit to something left very, very unfinished. The Second World War is not one historical event among many but the crisis that shaped the world we still live in today. Our institutions, our sense of human rights, race, nationalism, authority, propaganda, trauma and collective responsibility were all reshaped by it and it’s aftermath.

That may be why questions of race, ancestry and inherited narrative are surfacing with such force right now. They are not isolated cultural debates but part of a conversation that was never completed. Slavery and a war did not end on a year or date; they continue through the stories families tell, the institutions societies build, and the fears passed down unexamined.

Seen this way, our current astrology is now about reaching the next stage of understanding its consequences. Whether we like it or not, we are processing the assumptions and distributions of power that those events left in place, forged in a period when power itself was unbounded. The question needs to stop being about who is right. And become more about questioning what we have truly inherited without our full recognition or awareness. And then, most importantly, can we recreate in a different form?

One more point, if the declination cycle really does correlate with extreme periods then such periods are that driven by wisdom. Dismantling concentrated power can produce liberation but it can just as easily produce new concentrations of power just under different names, and we need to remain alert to the potential for reform itself to be hijacked. I do not read this cycle as power turning bad and then reform turning good; the redistribution of power clearly carries its own dangers.

Lets read it more as a living process: power becomes concentrated, contradictions accumulate, existing arrangements grow harder to sustain, power is contested and redistributed, and new structures emerge. Whether those structures are more humane remains a human question. And it is precisely this much larger process that makes what is happening around Forrest (and others) worth returning to, because in the micro (or focal point) we can see the same questions—where power is, where it is moving, and what happens when it changes hands.

Forrest may represent one side of the polarity: leo established individual authority that has not fully reckoned with the power of its throne. And then the response to Forrest may represent the other side: a newly empowered collective that is insufficiently aware of it’s power of collective moral judgement.

Neither side stands outside the Pluto process. Both are inside it. I know I’m hammering these points home in different ways, but its important we circle around this from different angles before we come to what can bring transformation! And the fundamentally real developmental question is how does individual authority and collective accountability exist in relationship, without one becoming sovereign over the other?

That, for me, is the missing third possibility, the transformational position (which I am always looking for). Relationship. This takes Pluto’s question seriously, about power itself, rather than assuming power becomes safe the moment it moves from an individual into a collective.

This eclipse isn’t asking us to choose between the authority of the individual and the authority of the collective, but become aware of our own power, and whether we can be humble with that. It seems we have some distance to travel as yet. We might need to remain compassionate to the learning process.

So on this total solar eclipse, the Sun in Leo, the visible centre around which everything else organises itself, is temporarily obscured. Pluto through Aquarius is increasingly distributing power through groups, networks and institutions, while Pluto south out-of-bounds intensifies the challenge to established concentrations of power and pushes that redistribution further.

The Sun and Moon come together in the most incredible way, with the Moon itself passing across the Leo Sun. If the Sun speaks to the sovereign individual centre and the Moon to relationship, perhaps the image here is of sovereignty being brought directly into relationship with others. Rather than being absorbed into the collective, how we remain fully ourselves while meeting one another. My hope is that Leo authority isn’t disappearing, it’s transforming.

The invitation within this eclipse is that power is not simply passed like a baton from one authority to another, but calls each of us into greater sovereignty: able to answer from our own conscience while remaining in relationship with others. This is part of the third, transformative, Christed path: where individual sovereignty gives us the courage to remain ourselves within the collective, and collective responsibility asks us to remain conscious of the power we exercise over one another.

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For more on how this Solar Eclipse in Leo affects your sign, go to Sovereign Being