The Lion’s Gate, 2026

The Lion’s Gate phenomenon comes up every year on August 8th, and it is resurging in the zeitgeist. A question I was asked about it recently sent me back to the topic. There was an article here on Find Your Nova on August 8th, 2024 and a YouTube video with it, running less than eight minutes. Its a short video and it’s a short article, so you can read those, but in addition to that there is some additional information and some things worth talking about.

For a full length exploration of this topic you can download my white paper for it from my digital download store: Lion’s Gate: The Eightfold Gate

It’s a numerological event

Just reminding people that the Lion’s Gate phenomenon is a numerological phenomenon, it is people connecting to the number eight. The Lion’s Gate is on 8/8: August is the 8th month of the Gregorian calendar, and the 8th is the 8th day of that month, which is why we talk about the Lion’s Gate being a 88 (double eight) event. In 2024 the year also added up to eight, since 2 plus 0 plus 2 plus 4 was 8. This year we have something going on as well, because if we take the last two digits, which is a common thing, we say August 8th, ‘26, and 2 plus 6 is 8. Again, this year we have a way to bring 8 into the digits of the year.

But this is entirely numerological, and has nothing to do with any astrological conditions. The fact that it’s the Gregorian calendar is something we’re all kind of culturally connected to, but those are certainly not the same numbers in the Chinese calendar or the Thai calendar or any of the other different kinds of calendar systems, and the numerology doesn’t hold up in the same way that it does in the Gregorian calendar.

It is also, from the New Age movement around the focus on the Lion’s Gate, specifically connected to the rise of the double eight expressions in popular Chinese culture, which is becoming almost as commercialized in Chinese culture as Christmas is in Western American culture. It is a very popularized idea, connecting the number eight to wealth and prosperity through homophony, and through the stylization of the Latin character eight with the Chinese characters. The Mandarin 八 (bā) sits very close to 发 (fā), to prosper, and the Cantonese pair baat and faat is closer still. Beijing opened its Olympics at 8:08:08 in the evening on 8/8/2008. Written twice in the Hindu-Arabic numerals we use, 88 mirrors 囍 (shuāngxǐ), the double happiness character, which is 喜 doubled and belongs to weddings. There is also the numeral itself, where we have the infinity sign on it, standing upright. These are the cultural crossovers that get compounded, and that people jump onto and get excited about.

So even though there’s no real basis for the Lion’s Gate experience other then the fact that it’s numerological, it’s only numerological in the Gregorian calendar, and we’re using concepts from Chinese culture that have also leveraged Western concepts to arrive at this idea of prosperity and wealth and whatnot. That is the caveat.

The astrological correlate

There is an astrological phenomenon that, while it’s not exactly tied to August 8th, does have a corelation to the experience that’s going on. The last article and the video both cover it, but briefly for here, it goes back to the thema mundi.

Around this time of year the sun happens to be about halfway through Leo, its sign of domicile, and that placement halfway through Leo is it’s placement in the thema mundi, the birth chart of the world, which is tied to back when astrology was becoming codified, at the rising of the Nile. This is something that Demetra George talks about in her volumes on Hellenistic astrology: the rising of the Nile, the heliacal rising of Sirius and the moon in Cancer.

Around the 8th of August the sun is half through Leo, the moon in Cancer is rising and moving into a balsamic phase with the sun, and Sirius is rising. The ascendant in Cancer puts Leo into the second house of resources and money, and with the sun in the house of money, in its domicile, it’s supposed to indicate wealth and prosperity.

There is an astrological condition that we can talk about, but it’s not specifically tied to the number eight; it’s tied to the fact that this is mirroring the configuration of the luminaries in the thema mundi, which is the birth chart of the world.

The moon is in Cancer for a couple days, two and a half days, so the condition might last for about 2.5 days. The very first time that it happens, when the moon is very first in Cancer and the ascendant is in Cancer, right at the early parts of Cancer, the sun will be in the middle of Leo, and it kind of happens somewhere between the 7th and the 9th of August every year. This year the moon crosses the ascendant for the first time in Cancer this Leo season on August 9th, at 2:43 a.m. Pacific time, so for only a small part of the world will it happen on August 8. [VERIFY: the 2026 date is yours and is not in question: August 9, 2:43 a.m. Pacific. What is still open is the general claim in the sentence before it. Your 2024 video puts this same configuration on August 2 in Berkeley, around 3 a.m., and your 2026 figure puts it on August 9. Two years, seven days apart, which a fixed 7th-to-9th window does not cover. Your sentence is left exactly as you said it; whether to widen it is your call.]

Why eight, though

That being said, there is some universal signification for why the number eight is specifically associated with luck and prosperity and good things.

When we start with the number one, we start with the indivisible unity of all things. One is one, and there’s no seperation from one. But the minute we have two ones, one plus one is two, and that’s how we get two: the only way we can get to two is for one to divide, whether we think of that as a spontaneous division or however we want to think about it. One is by itself, and a second one makes two.

We have three components: we have a one, we have another one, and the one and the one make two, and two is, by itself, its own thing. The two ones are independent ones, which is like Gemini, the experience of Gemini, two ones; then we have two, which is its own thing, the union of ones, two ones together making two. That’s three things: an individuated one, an individuated one, and the two, which is the union of the two individuated ones. That’s how we get one, two and three.

If we’re using the Fibonacci sequence, or any of the different sequences that use the same kind of starting weight, one plus one is two, one plus two is three, three plus two is five, on and on.

Just starting off with one, two and three, three was considered the first perfect number: it has a begining, a middle and an end. We can think of three as the first number that has cadency, fixedness, and mutability, since all three modalities can be found within the number three.

Two represents the duality and three represents the trinity, and when you take two and raise it to the power of three, you get eight, the first perfect cube. The Pythagoreans called it the Ogdoad and named it the first solid cube for that reason. That’s how we get to eight.

Scorpio and the eighth place

The Sovereign Sacrifice, a paper I wrote, deals with the fall of the moon in Scorpio, which is the eighth sign of the zodiac when we’re dealing with the tropical zodiac. That is the connection to the number eight: the moon, in its fall there, is where the ego was at its weakest, allowing Shakyamuni Buddha to attain enlightenment when the full moon was in Scorpio. You can look at how the moon is connected to the number eight through the sign of Scorpio.

Oftentimes the eighth is considered, in astrology systems, a bad place, and the Hellenistic sources are unanimous that the moon there is in her fall, her tapeinōma. The Vedic sidereal tradition reads the same degrees as the nakshatras Viśākhā, the toraṇa or triumphal archway, and Anurādhā, the lotus that blooms in muddy water, and reads them as attainment rather than weakness: there the moon reaches her highest goal. The mud allows the lotus, and the fall is the archway. There’s a number of good qualities about the number eight, historically, and we can see its connection mathematically and astrologically.

The eighth house is also considered an idle place, and astrologically we might think of eight as not being the greatest number, but it is the place, that idle place, succeeding to the seventh house, which in its largest archetypal signification is the union of spirit and matter. We talk about it in a mundane way as marriage and partnerships, but its philisophical underpinning is the sun setting into the earth, inseminating it. The eighth place, succeeding to that, is preparing for that union, and even though no planets rejoice in the eighth house, it is directly connected to preceding the divine union. The hieros gamos, the sacred union, the sacred marriage.

The circle and Venus

Eight can also signify the eight directions, and eight is the last whole integer that divides the circle. One is the entire circle itself, two represents the diameter of the circle, so it’s bisecting the circle, and three creates the cross of matter. We have the bisecting of the circle, and then using a compass we can bisect that line, and in bisecting the line we then have four quadrants. Also using a compass we can bisect those four 90-degree angles, and we get 45 degree angles, so that with a compass and straight edge we can bisect the circle and create the eight divisions of equal number of degrees.

Eight is the last integer that does that, and nine does not. Eight is the only number that can do it through this bisecting, and it does it through three sets of bisecting, so it’s again one, two and three: one divides a circle, two bisects that line, creating quadrants, and three, the bisection of those, creates the eightfold divisions of the circle. Nine, 10, 11. Eight’s the only one that does that, so it has that special quality associated with it. One, two and three get there placements in the circle not through using a straight edge but through repeated circular division of the circle, creating the seed of life.

Also, Venus is connected to eight, because eight years is the full cycle of Venus through all five of its Venus star points, and it does that in 13 orbits of Venus. We have the 5, 8 and 13 that connected to Venus, three consecutive Fibonacci numbers, and eight is a critical number in that cycle as well. Kepler took the Earth and Venus relationship to be the clearest instance of the golden proportion anywhere in the solar system.

There’s a lot that has to do with eight, and a lot of it good: the first perfect cube, the eight divisions of the circle, the eighth sign of the zodiac where the moon is in its fall, the eight years of Venus, who is beautiful and benefic. Mathematically there’s a positive, fundamental mathematics connected to the number eight, and numerologically there’s a lot of power in it. It’s obvious why people have aspirational ideas for prosperity around the number, and why the modern phenomenon of the Lion’s Gate makes sense, especially as we look at the evolution of things culturally.

But astrologically it’s not exactly the eighth. There is a time, this time of year, when the sun is in its domicile in the middle of the sign, which is its power place, in the second house, which is the house of money, and it happens once a year around this time.

So that’s my spiel on the Lion’s Gate this year.

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