Leo (23 July - 22 August)
original art by Bex McKay
Percy Bysshe Shelley: You Might Know Him As Mr. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Close your eyes and think of a single work by Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 August 1792). Go ahead. We’ll wait.
Yeah. We didn’t think so. And yet, the author of poems like “Ozymandias,” “Prometheus Unbound,” “Queen Mab,” and “Rosalind and Helen” was one of the most important figures of the English Romantic movement. Shelley exhibits many classic Leo traits: he was vain, had an outsized personality, he wanted to stand out, and he was warm and creative. Given his prolific output and the impact he had on English literature and poetry, it’s incredible that he was only 29 when he died.
The motto for Leo is “I will,” and Shelley’s life was nothing but “I will.” As in “I will terrorize my family with my childhood experiments with gunpowder, acid, and electricity.” Or “I will try to impress all the 19th century Goth girls living near Eton by attempting to raise spirits with occult rituals.” Or “I will reject Christianity so publicly and forcefully that it will result in my expulsion from university, creating a rift with my rich and influential father.” And most famously, “I will reject the traditional constraints of marriage (although that won’t stop me from getting married) so that I can stick it wherever I please.”
The tarot card for this month is the 5 of wands, which emphasizes clashing ego and unruliness. So…kind of spot on. Shelley’s ego clashed with just about anyone who could be described as “establishment,” including his schools, the church, his parents’ upper-class society, and anyone who didn’t like vegetarians. His unruliness meant that, from the time he was expelled from Oxford, he led a more or less nomadic existence with a revolving cast of characters, including his first wife Harriet, her sister, his best friend, his second wife, other writers and artists, and various people involved in politically radical movements. The group were political agitators, calling for religious and economic reform in the wake of the Napoleonic wars that left so many starving and without work.
When reversed, the 5 of wands indicates compromise and suppressed temper, and an argument can be made that he tried those things early in his life, but then gave them up. In 1810 he wrote Zastrozzi, a Gothic novel in which he had the villain espousing his own atheistic beliefs, allowing him to disavow those opinions as his own. He also compromised his firm belief in “free love” by marrying first Harriet Westbrook, and then, three weeks after Harriet’s suicide, Mary Wollstonecraft, although he didn’t let his married status prevent him from sleeping with anyone he fancied. But perhaps that was just him giving into his Leo nature, which led to a penchant for a drama-filled love life.
Shelley departed from traditional Leo traits at the end of his life. While Leos are typically thought of as mentally and emotionally strong, Shelley suffered from life-long mental illness, leading him to claim to have been attacked on more than one occasion. It was well known that he suffered from nightmares, hallucinations, and sleepwalking that increased during times of stress. Sadly, his mental and emotional problems led to his suicide in July of 1822, when, against advice, tried to sail from Leghorn to La Spezia.
