The new Moon solar eclipse peaks at 18:36 bst on Wednesday 12th August with Sun and Moon exact conjunct in the house of the Lion. The first total solar eclipse over mainland Europe since 11 August 1999, and the first over Spain since 1905. In 1999 it was 18°Leo. This one is 20°. Twenty-seven years apart and less than two degrees between them. If you were alive and paying attention in the summer of 1999, whatever that eclipse cracked open in your sense of who you were is being reflected back to you now to see what you did with it.
New Moon Total Solar Eclipse in Leo, 12 August 2026: The Empty Throne
On the same New Moon night, the Perseids peak, the darkest sky the shower has had in years. Fire in the sign of fire. Two skies in one night, one where the light goes out and one where it falls in a glittering shower.
Unusually, the eclipse makes no major aspects even though Leo is busy with Mercury at 5 degrees and Jupiter at 9, but nobody is standing close enough to touch the Moon itself. Only Saturn, retrograde at 14 Aries, reaches it in a trine. And because the Sun rules Leo, this eclipse puts out the light that governs everything else in the sign. Mercury, Jupiter, the Moon, all of them answering to a Sun that is going dark. As the ancients would say, the king’s own lamp, snuffed out, with his whole court still in the room.
The Sabian Symbol tells you what to do with that, and it isn’t flattering. At 20 Leo the image is people performing a ritual to the sun. Formal, reverent, knowing exactly what they are for. One minute later, at 20°01′, we cross into the twenty first degree and the image becomes intoxicated chickens dizzily flapping their wings, trying to fly.
Chickens don’t fly. They have wings, they have the ancestral memory of flight somewhere in the body, but they have been bred to the ground so long that they’ve lost the capacity. Give them fermented grain however and they forget. Wine has always stood for ecstatic experience, contact with something larger than yourself. The chickens are the ones who got at the wine without the training. What flaps is the ego, and the ego has never once flown. This is what losing touch with realism looks like: false courage, giddiness, attempting too much too soon, before you’ve matured enough to handle it, getting absolutely nowhere with tremendous enthusiasm. Enjoy the high while it lasts. The only real danger is overreaching so far that something breaks at precisely the moment when the Sun goes dark.
The nodal axis changed signs at the end of July, north node into Aquarius, south node into Leo. This is the first new Moon and solar eclipse of that new chapter. South Node eclipses do not add. They subtract. Something needs releasing – usually the thing you have been holding up with both hands while telling everyone it is fine. The previous Leo/Aquarius eclipse runs were 2016 to 2019, 2008 to 2009, and 1998 to 2000. Look at what was ending in you then. Not the events, the identity. Who you had to stop being. The same door is open now. What part of your identity has become redundant and needs to die with the King?
Underneath all of this the sky is hosting a chain of sextiles running two thirds of the way round the wheel in the fire and air signs. Pluto at 3 Aquarius, Neptune at 4 Aries, Uranus at 5 Gemini, Mercury at 5 Leo, Venus at 5 Libra. Five planetary bodies, each sixty degrees from the next. Five points of a six-pointed hexagram. The only empty chair is at 5 Sagittarius, which is the seat of the teacher, the guru, the meaning maker. Nobody is in it. On an eclipse whose symbol warns about drinking the mystical wine too young, the seat of the one who is supposed to explain it all to you is vacant. The teaching is clear – you are going to have to do this yourself. No-one is coming to save you. YOU are the one you’ve been waiting for but the initiation is going to be potentially messy!
Mercury our winged messenger is where the action is. His sextile to Uranus perfects within hours of the eclipse, which is the lightning strike of an idea arriving sideways, keep a notebook handy. He meets Jupiter exact on 15 August at 10 Leo, bringing genuine expansion of expression and words that travel further than you expected them to. But he also opposes Pluto which is the moment your words meet real power and you find out whether they heal or harm. Say less and mean it. Anything overly pretentious said this week will come back to haunt you in September.
Venus has just entered Libra and she’s uncomfortable. Trine Uranus, trine Pluto, sextile Jupiter, means there is charm and opportunity and unexpected doors opening. But she opposes Neptune in Aries, and she squares his ruler Mars. Venus opposite Neptune is the aspect of the seemingly beautiful arrangement that turns out to be a mirage, the agreement everybody wants to believe in, the person who is lovely and unavailable, the price that was never the real price. Ask what things are actually worth this week rather than what they are being valued at.
And Mars has just crossed into Cancer, a sign he has no strength in, where anger goes sideways and comes out as a felt tone rather than voiced truth. He squares Neptune exact around the 17th. Force with fog in it. Water, oil, borders, the invisible arteries again, and it is almost too exact that this lands while Iran finalises a pact over reopening the Strait of Hormuz, a refinery burns in Saudi Arabia and a peace plan announced as historic is rejected within the week. Personally, the instruction is simple, if there is a hard thing to say, say it plainly. It is kinder than the version where you pretend to be fine.
Saturn, retrograde in Aries, is the only planet with a handle on this eclipse, and the trine means he is helping rather than blocking. He is also auditing and demanding accountability. Which responsibility did you claim and never act on? Which boundary did you draw and stop defending? Retrograde Saturn in the warrior’s sign has a special talent for arriving at the point where a big claim meets an actual rule, as evidenced by a court in Washington telling a president he cannot build his ballroom without Congress, or Fauci being held in contempt of court.
Pedestals always wobble under a Leo eclipse. And Spain, the country the full eclipse completes in, is burning, whilst its borders are being tested. Two thousand square kilometres gone this year, six times last year’s figure, forty major fires, a thousand people evacuated, and something approaching half a million more travelling into that tinderbox to stand in the dark for two minutes. The Lion’s own land alight while the light goes out over it. If you are heading anywhere dry to watch, be the person who thinks about sparks.
So, what does this eclipse actually ask of us?
Less, is the honest answer. It wants the version of yourself you have been maintaining for an audience to stop. Not your gifts, your warmth, your work but the maintenance of it. The bit where you constantly check how it landed. Leo’s south node shadow is not vanity, it is the exhausting labour of being received well. Something in your life is being kept alive by that labour and it’s that something that needs to be released to allow the more authentic you to flourish.
This isn’t the week to force an answer. Eclipses do not conclude, they open, and what surfaces around this one will make far more sense twelve months from now when the second Leo eclipse arrives. If you feel flattened, tearful, oddly grieving, weirdly relieved, all four in an afternoon, that is the shape of it. Rest. Cancel things. The eclipse’s second half, a partial lunar eclipse at 5 Pisces on 28 August, is where the feeling of all this will finally land.
Go outside on Wednesday evening. Face west, glasses on, and watch the light go strange and silver and cool while the birds get confused and the sheep start baying. Then after midnight, lie on your back under the sky, and let the Perseids come. Do not ask them for anything. That is the practice this week. A sky that gives you a hundred falling lights and takes no requests, on the same night that the Sun in the sign of kings goes out and comes back on, without reference to your opinion, exactly as it has done for four and a half billion years. Revel in the great mystery and radical acceptance of the Now.
Wishing you all infinite new moon love and blessings.
If this eclipse is asking you to put something down, or you can feel an identity ending without yet knowing what replaces it, I offer private one to one sessions combining over 35 years’ experience in astrology, Gene Keys, tarot and shamanic work.
To enquire or book: www.davinamackail.com
Shamanic Ritual: The Empty Throne
This is a ritual of release. Do it during the eclipse itself if you can, any time between 18:16 and 20:06 bst on August 12th, or after dark if you are watching the sky instead.
You will need a candle lit indoors, a bowl of water, paper and a pen, and one small stone you are willing to give away.
Sit down. Light the candle. Take a few slow breaths until your shoulders come down.
Write one sentence naming the version of yourself you are still performing. Who you are when people are watching. Be specific and unkind about it, nobody else is reading this.
Then underneath it or on a separate piece of paper, write the sentence that is the deeper truth of you when no-one is watching. One line. No explaining.
Read the first one aloud, then tear it and put it in the water. Read the second one aloud. Then read it again quietly and notice which reading you believed.
Take the stone into your right hand and hold it while you say out loud the one thing you have been keeping alive purely so that it looks right from the outside. Blow this thought into the stone. Then set the stone down outside on the earth and leave it there, somewhere you will not see it or notice it again. Or throw it (safely!) far away from you. This is the part of you, you are releasing.
Pour the water onto the ground or into a plant.
Keep the true sentence. Put it somewhere you will find it by accident. Look at it again on 28th August when the Moon goes into shadow, and again next August (2027) when the second eclipse comes to see what you did.
Then go out and watch the meteors and ask for nothing at all.
So mote it be….
