The Lion’s Gate is a Western Colonial Lie. Here’s Why
The popularised concept of the “Lion’s Gate Portal” opening annually on August 8th (8/8) is not rooted in authentic Egyptian cosmology, astronomy, or religious practice. It is a modern fabrication, retroactively spiritualised, and ultimately marketed by New Age communities — often without critical analysis or historical accountability.
1. The Ancient Egyptian Calendar Was Not Fixed
The premise that a fixed date such as August 8th holds metaphysical significance collapses when we understand that:
The ancient Egyptian calendar was composed of two systems: the solar (civil) calendar, used for administrative and agricultural purposes, and the lunar, which governed religious festivals and spiritual rites.
These two calendars did not align perfectly. In fact, they rarely coincided, and when they did, it was seen as a powerful convergence — but never on a fixed annual date.
The solar calendar was 365 days long, and due to the lack of a leap year adjustment, it drifted slowly over time, realigning with the heliacal rising of Sirius approximately every 1,460 years (the Sothic Cycle).
Last but certainly not least, the modern Gregorian calendar — from which the “8/8 portal” is derived — did not exist and bears no alignment with Kemetic timekeeping.
Thus, there was no such thing as a fixed “8/8 portal” in ancient Egypt. The notion of rigid annual alignments is an anachronism, projected backwards from modern Gregorian frameworks.
2. The Heliacal Rising of Sirius is Not Fixed to 8/8
The heliacal rising of Sirius — a sacred celestial event for the Egyptians — marked the annual inundation of the Nile, a symbol of rebirth, fertility, and divine nourishment.
However, the date of Sirius’s rising shifts depending on geographic latitude, epoch, and calendar system. It does not consistently occur on August 8th, nor was this date recognised or celebrated in antiquity.
At the latitude of ancient Thebes or Heliopolis, the heliacal rising of Sirius currently occurs in late July, not August — and this would have shifted significantly over millennia.
To claim 8/8 as a universal portal date is therefore astronomically illiterate and historically ungrounded.
3. The Lion Symbolism is Retrofitted
The association of the “Lion’s Gate” with Leo season and the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet is a retroactive symbolic overlay.
While Leo is indeed ruled by the Sun, and Sekhmet holds solar attributes, the Egyptians did not organise spiritual rituals around the zodiac as we understand it today. Nor was Sekhmet in all her glory linked to the archetype of Leo though its an easy association to make if you’re superficially educated in Kemetic metaphysics (or overly invested in Western interpretations of Kemetic metaphysics). The Hellenistic zodiac we are familiar with today came much later and was filtered through Babylonian, Greek, and Roman influences and holds extremely limited links to the real Kemetic zodiac system though so many western thinkers claim (wrongly) otherwise.
The use of “lion” here is archetypally seductive, but functionally ahistorical when tethered to 8/8. It conflates archetypal resonance with calendrical fact.
These systems are often reverse-engineered to validate pre-decided narratives — not developed from authentic source material.
This is where left-brain thinking is critical. Logic, rigour, evidence, and historical method must accompany mysticism — or the result is fantasy masquerading as fact.
4. The Nile Flood Was Not a Single-Day Event
The Nile’s inundation was a seasonal process, not a momentary gateway. It unfolded over weeks, gradually transforming the landscape and marking the turning of the agricultural year.
This flooding was cyclical and tied to Sirius, but it did not correspond to one singular ceremonial date — let alone one that aligns with a modern Western calendar.
5. Spiritual Capitalism and the Commodification of Myth
The proliferation of “Lion’s Gate” rituals, crystal sales, and portal meditations on 8/8 is a case study in spiritual capitalism — not sacred tradition.
Just as Saturnalia was rebranded as Christmas, and Eostre was hollowed into Easter chocolates, the Lion’s Gate functions as a consumer-facing myth. It generates profit, not prophecy.
These narratives are made digestible for digital audiences, stripped of their historical complexity, and then sold back as a kind of spiritual product. This is intellectual colonialism, and it is dangerous. It hijacks economic ecosystems, rewrites history, and silences the living descendants of those ancient lineages.
Worse still, this distraction persists while global atrocities unfold, such as man-made famine, colonial occupation, and economic warfare. To participate in spiritual consumerism without critique is to risk complicity in the systems that profit from distraction and disempowerment.
5. The Leo-Sirius Link is Arbitrary and Western-Centric
The association between Leo season and Sirius is a modern, tropical zodiac interpretation.
In Vedic astrology (sidereal system), for example, it is currently Cancer season, not Leo.
So, even within the astrological world, there is no global agreement on what season we’re in — let alone what cosmic portal is “opening.”To universalise 8/8 as a sacred date is therefore not just inaccurate. It is imperialist thinking cloaked in spiritual garb.
Egyptology has long been a colonial project, historically dominated by European scholars who stripped artifacts, reinterpreted meanings, and excluded native Egyptians from discourse.
The New Age movement continues this pattern under a different guise: monetising "Sirius", "Sekhmet", "Ra", etc., while disconnecting them from the living Egyptian soul.
Reconstructing a Lost Zodiac
Some proponents of the Lion’s Gate claim that this event ties into the ancient Egyptian astrological system — particularly Leo season and the solar symbolism of the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet. But here too, the waters are muddied and clearly there’s a widespread misinformation about what these Neter actually symbolise in the Egyptian psyche and what their function is. The over reliance on Western academia (and pseudo academia), and largely ignoring - even erasing - indigenous voices around their own heritage, has come at a determinant for everyone interested in Egypt alike.
The truth is: we do not have a full or intact record of a pre-Hellenistic Egyptian zodiac. What survives — such as the famous Dendera Zodiac (which has been stolen by France)— comes from a period of significant Greek influence, during the late Ptolemaic and early Roman eras. Prior to that, Egyptians organised their cosmology around decan stars (36 star groups rising every 10 days), not zodiac signs in the way we understand them now.
It is entirely possible that Egypt had its own rich astrological tradition — but that tradition has been fragmented by time and colonisation, and cannot be reconstructed with the confidence that many New Age narratives claim.
Voices that claim to ‘know’ Kemetic astrology have neatly swapped Hellensic, Greek and Roman archetypes with the original Neter archetypes and pretended this is now the truth. Whose truth? Certainly not according the indigenous Egyptian psyche and more of my future writing will address and refute these claims intellectually and metaphysically in painful and rigorous detail.
Moreover, even among contemporary astrologers, there is disagreement. While tropical astrology places the Sun in Leo on August 8, Vedic (sidereal) astrology still places the Sun in Cancer. If astrologers themselves cannot agree on what zodiac sign the Sun occupies on this date, how can we speak of a fixed, global “portal”?
Conclusion
Colonialism is not just an external force; it is an energetic distortion field that reshapes the world through a single, self-privileging lens. And under its influence, we all lose. The attempt to whitewash and explain everything through frameworks that position whiteness as inherently superior does more than rewrite history — it erodes the truth itself. And truth, in these times of mass illusion, is more precious than gold.
To reduce Egyptology and Kemetic cosmology to a canon filtered only through the Western gaze is not scholarship — it is a colonial enterprise masquerading as science. A project of control, not of inquiry. And it is long past time that this narrative be returned to those who still carry its memory in their blood, their rituals, and their living culture. Egypt belongs to her people. And yes — we are still here.
Astrologically, we are entering a new intellectual and historical reckoning. Uranus in Gemini squaring Virgo and Piscian placements signals a collective disruption of the false, the fabricated, and the selectively forgotten. We are moving through a timeline in which no lie will be left unexposed — even without a “Coldplay kiss cam” to trigger the moment. Truth is emerging, unscripted, uninvited, and unstoppable.
And yet, in this wave of exposure, new distortions rise too.
Entire platforms — from the Gaia Network to fringe Afrocentrist cults spreading across the U.S. — continue to push dangerous mythologies. They claim to restore truth while displacing and erasing the very descendants of Kemet, often painting the indigenous Egyptians as foreigners and colonisers in their own land. As though the arrival of a few thousand Arabs 1,500 years ago could overwrite millennia of civilisation, memory, and rooted presence.
But Egypt is not a relic. Egypt is not a fantasy.
Egypt is alive. She is breathing through her people.
And despite the chaos, the wars, and the global erasure —
we are still standing.
