I got the Juice: the Lion's Gate, Lammas & the Season of Fruiting
The 8/8 Lion's Gate, the cross-quarter day of Lammas, and the season of juicy fruit
Ok, be real with me:
You love juice.
Right?
I know I do. I LOVE juice.
I mean, who wouldn’t? Fruits on the vine that are ripe to the point of bursting, just waiting to share their sweet nectar with whoever’s teeth are lucky enough to puncture their delicate skin. No corn syrup-water-substitutes, but real juice. You gotta love it.
I, for one, love taking a slice of dripping ripe watermelon, or a peach or a mango, into the shower with me and eating it the way a fruit is meant to be eaten- letting it drip and squish and getting myself super juicy and sticky before washing myself nice and clean.
I also love that the slang “juicy” means compelling and intriguing. I use it all the time.
Because it is… compelling and intriguing. And delicious.
(Just go watch some videos from lovefruitss on tiktok, the account of the Timucuan Ecological & Historic Preserve in Florida, and thank me later.)
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Juice is self expression.
I was floating on a pool noodle yesterday afternoon to escape the 99-degree desert heat, dreaming of the juicy passionfruit popsicles that were waiting for me in my freezer at home, and I suddenly couldn’t get this jam out of my head:
Back in 2013 when “Juice”- Chance the Rapper’s debut single- came out, it was blasting from my bike-boom-box whenever I wanted to feel… juicy. Which was pretty much all the time.
There are lots of songs and artists that also got the juice: Janelle Monae, Pharell Williams, Lizzo, Soulja Boy, Dream Junkies, Yo Gotti, Juice WRLD. The 1992 Tupac Shakur film Juice made the word pop off in hip hop culture, and it never slowed down.
But Chance the Rapper’s is my favorite. The juice that he got feels proud and confident yet humble - it’s not arrogant, compared to the rest. He uses the phrase "having the juice" as a metaphor for personal power, natural talent, and energy, and warns of the danger of too much thirst. It’s dripping with real, unadulterated, straight-from-the-fruit juice.
Creating Excitement
I had an ex who worked for a big direct sales/wholesale-to-retail company when he was a teenager, and in their morning meetings before going door-to-door selling chessboards and knives and other Chinese mass produced shit, they would get juiced.
There, JUICE stood for Join Us In Creating Excitement. It’s a high-energy team slogan and interactive chant popular with promotional teams and motivational corporate cultures. (This kind of juice was also made popular by a very dark scene in the film Requiem for a Dream, which I wish I could go back in time and shelter my teenage eyes from watching, but I digress…)
Regardless of how I feel about motivational corporate direct-sales culture (eww), the slogan Join Us In Creating Excitement really does capture the overall vibe of Juice.
The thing about juice is that you can’t see it, but you know exactly who has it, whose life is bursting with it.
In the 1800s, juice was slang for the electrical current that powers a city. In pop culture today, it is the exact same thing: a magnetic, invisible force of clout, respect, and authority.
If you got the juice, you hold the ultimate source of energy and influence.
Having this song pop in my head while dreaming of fruit pops in the pool makes so much sense with the astrology of the moment. The Jupiter-sun cazimi in Leo this week sat directly on my ascendant, and all that expansion happened in the Human Design Gate of Influence.
This is the gate with the shadow of arrogance, the gift of leadership, and the siddhi of humility. It’s the gate where the Lion King strolls out onto pride rock, feeling himself as he shakes his mane and looks out at the Circle-of-Life kingdom beneath him.
The Lion King has definitely got the juice.
Beyonce attested to this fact when she voiced Nala and created her visual spinoff album for Disney, Black is King, during the peak of Black Lives Matter movement in July 2020. It’s debut happened when the sun was in the gate of Influence, too, and whether that should be read as Disney’s corporate influence in their ability to capitalize off of civil rights movements or the truly powerful influence on the world by the African diaspora (or both), it was a very juicy release that Leo season.
”Follow your light…. or lose it. You can’t wear a crown with your head down”
-Black is King
Speaking of Lions…
As Leo season progresses, the sun and Jupiter will move forward through the sign of Leo from their meeting point of influence.
Jupiter will stay in Gate 33, the gate of Retreat, where the lion goes back into his den for a bit to think about what this whole Pride Rock thing really means for him, for all the other lions, and for the rest of the kingdom. The sun passes through there and then moves on to Gate 7, another Gate of Leadership, this one more about cooperation and leading from behind. It’s known as the Role of the Self. And while the sun is in this gate each year, we celebrate Lammas, the cross quarter day between Summer Solstice and Fall Equinox, and also… you guessed it, THE LIONS GATE 8/8 PORTAL.
By the time I publish this, your feed will probably already be drowning in reels telling you to manifest your dream life because the universe cracked open a magic door on 8/8 Lion’s Gate. And look, I’m not here to yuck anyone’s cosmic yum. But I got curious about where this actually comes from, because “portal” is doing a lot of work in these captions and nobody’s explaining the mechanics. So I went and found the real story, and it’s so much… juicier than the hashtag.
It starts with Egypt. Thousands of years ago. The brightest star in the sky, Sirius, would vanish from the night sky for about seventy days every single year, swallowed up in the glare of the sun. And then one morning it would come back. Just reappear, low on the horizon, right before dawn. The Egyptians had a name for this star as a goddess, Sopdet. Sopdet was a goddess who got folded into Isis a few centuries later- but Sopdet was her own goddess first. Her return mattered so much to them that they built their entire calendar around it. Because Sopdet coming back lined up with the Nile flooding, and the Nile flooding was the difference between fertile crops and a good harvest and a starving year. So her reappearance got a festival. It got called the new year. It was a huge deal.
Back then, in ancient Egypt, Sirius came back to rise in mid to late July. It wasn’t August 8th. This is because the earth wobbles on its axis over long stretches of time, a thing called precession, and that wobble slowly drags the date of Sirius’s reappearance, or heliacal rising, later and later across the centuries. Thousands of years later, standing where a lot of us stand now, that same star comes back in early August instead (the exact date changes depending on your specific location's latitude and horizon conditions). Which is why the date lines up on or close to 8/8 today and didn’t back then. Nobody planned the numerology. The sky just drifted into it.
I’ll admit I’m not neutral on any of this. Sirius was the first celestial body to rise with my ascendant the moment I was born. So of course I have a soft spot for the Lion’s Gate. It’s basically been my whole life saying hello to me every August since day one.
Back in Egypt, knowing exactly when Sopdet would reappear was not casual information. The priests who could track her return and predict the flood held actual power because of it. They were the ones who could tell the pharaoh when the water was coming back to life, when the fields would feed the kingdom again.
That’s juice in its oldest form, the invisible current that everyone recognizes and nobody can fake. And the lion was already sitting in the middle of this whole story, long before anyone called it a gate. Egypt had lion goddesses like Sekhmet, who carried the brilliant radiance of sun and powerful fury in one body. And the Sphinx guarded the whole place with a lion’s body. So when Beyonce leaned into lion imagery for Black is King, crown and mane and all, she wasn’t reaching for a Disney mascot. She was reaching for the same authority the Egyptians built entire dynasties on top of, the juice of knowing deep truths about the sky and letting them move you.
So, power to you on 8/8 Lion’s Gate. Get that juice.
Because there’s another layer to this:
The juice isn’t a metaphor - it’s a whole damn season.
Here’s how I actually track time, if you don’t already know this about me. Over the past couple of years, I haven’t been using four standard seasons or even twelve Zodiac signs to feel into where I am in the year.
I use eight.
The Wheel of the Year splits a trip around the sun into eight thresholds: four solstices and equinoxes and four cross quarter days tucked halfway between them, the old fire festivals that agricultural cultures built their lives around.
Lammas is one of those four cross quarter days. It was the first harvest festival in ancient Europe, the one where the ancestors marked the fields and the trees both starting to give things over at the same time. Fruit off the branch, grain off the stalk, together, at the same threshold and beyond.
And if you were to follow the life cycle of a plant instead of a human-coded-calendar, this is exactly the move that’s happening right now. From summer solstice to Lammas, Cancer season into the beginning of Leo, we’re in the season of fertilization - the inward part of the life cycle that nobody sees, when pollen finds its way to ovum after the pollination of spring. A season where nothing visible is happening on the outside but everything is coming into being on the inside.
Now, at Lammas- which coincides with the Lion’s Gate and Sirius’ heliacal rising- we’re about to move out of that fertile, inward stillness and into the season of outward, expressive FRUIT. The part of the plant that got fertilized in secret is finally showing itself, swelling, getting soft, ripening, and turning into something you can pick with your hands and eat in the shower.
You don’t get to fruit without going through fertilization first. Real juice doesn’t come into being without a deep setup of elapsed time and inner awareness that unfurled before it
In the Human Design mandala, the gate that opens this season, the gate that ushers us from the season of fertilization to the season of fruit, is Gate 7, sitting right where the sun crosses into that first harvest point. In the Human Design bodygraph, Gate 7 lives in the G center of identity and direction, and it’s known as the Role of the Self, a soft kind of leadership that doesn’t perform.
After being on pride rock and then going back into the den, the lion realizes that they just need to hold their own direction so cleanly that other people start orienting around it without being asked. Sounds a lot like that yummy humble juice to me.
And here’s a super intriguing part of all this: Gate 7 is the first hexagram/gate of all 64 to have WATER as its lower trigram. From Gate 7 at Lammas all the way to the fall equinox, each of the eight gates in a row has that same water base, holding and swelling and concentrating, the exact motion of something going from hard to dripping.
Gate 7, the gate that the sun moves into this week for Lammas/Lughnassa on August 7th and the Lion’s Gate on 8/8, is represented by the trigrams Earth above Water. In the I Ching that combination symbolizes groundwater held inside the earth, a reservoir that’s invisible from the surface but completely full underneath. Ready to pop.
You can’t see it and yet you know exactly who has it, remember?
So yeah. Juice.
This whole season- from Lammas on August 7th through the September 21 Equinox- this whole season truly got the juice.
It was never just a song I liked.
It’s the actual water-filled trigram running under my feet for six weeks straight during late summer. It’s this beautiful season of water, self-expression, the first harvest… of bursting, juicy LIFE.
This week from now until August 4th, the Gate of Retreat helps us go into our dens for a few days and reflect on what has come up in our lives since Summer Solstice, when the season of Mountain began. Now we enter the season of Water- and water contained in the sweet self expression of the plant in her cycle: the juicy fruit.
There’s a good chance you’re hot right now, so go get yourself a popsicle or your fave fruit to celebrate this seasonal threshold. I’ll be sending out more ritual ideas and horoscopes for the season ahead to my paid subscribers later this week.
So…. what’s your favorite juice?