A Big Man

The image tradition for this degree goes back to 1925, to a session Marc Edmund Jones held with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, drawing all 360 cards blind and at random. Jones's book followed in 1953, though the phrasing most commonly cited now is Dane Rudhyar's, from his 1973 An Astrological Mandala, a text this page leaves unquoted because it is still under copyright. It falls in the third decan of Libra (degrees 21 to 30), and is Libra's twenty fourth degree. Its decan is ruled by Jupiter rather than Venus, which colors the degree with something Libra does not supply on its own.

The narrower term division belongs to Venus, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. There is an independent image for this degree from 1898, decades before the Sabian set existed. Charubel's book puts it this way: a big man. He resembles a giant, but the lower limbs look black; this appears to creep upwards. Libra opens the second half of the zodiac and turns air's exchange into a question of balance between two parties. Read this way, the degree is less a fortune than a location: a specific point in Libra's arc, with its own decan and term layered on top.