A Vessel Rolling in the Trough of a Rough Sea

It falls in the second decan of Aquarius (degrees 11 to 20), and is Aquarius's sixteenth degree. Its decan is ruled by Mercury rather than Saturn, which colors the degree with something Aquarius does not supply on its own. The narrower term division belongs to Jupiter, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. Aquarius is fixed air, a stubborn commitment to an idea or a group rather than to a single feeling. There is an independent image for this degree from 1898, decades before the Sabian set existed.

Charubel's book puts it this way: a vessel rolling in the trough of a rough sea. This degree belongs to the symbol set assembled by Marc Edmund Jones after a 1925 sitting with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, where all 360 degrees were drawn blind from a shuffled deck of cards. Jones's own book followed in 1953, but the interpretation most people encounter today was written afterward, by Dane Rudhyar in his 1973 An Astrological Mandala, and Rudhyar's exact phrasing is withheld here because it remains his estate's copyrighted property. None of this is meant as prophecy; it is a way of describing where, precisely, this degree sits inside Aquarius's larger pattern.