A Wooden Bridge Over a Chasm, a Man at the End Hesitating

Marc Edmund Jones assembled this degree, along with the other 359, from a 1925 sitting with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, drawing all the cards at random so nothing could be anticipated. His 1953 book set the images down for the first time. The interpretive language read today, however, belongs to Dane Rudhyar's 1973 An Astrological Mandala, still in copyright, and it is not quoted on this page. It falls in the third decan of Sagittarius (degrees 21 to 30), and is Sagittarius's twenty first degree.

No decan or term ruler is recorded for this particular degree among its listed facts, so the reading here rests on the sign and the image alone rather than on a claimed planetary layer. One further source stands apart from the Jones and Rudhyar material entirely. Charubel's 1898 degree symbols, compiled well before Balboa Park, give this degree a wooden bridge over a chasm, a man at the end hesitating to trust himself on it. As the sign that closes the fire triplicity, Sagittarius turns Leo's certainty about self into a claim about meaning at large. Taken together, the position, the decan, and the old image give this degree a specific character within Sagittarius rather than a generic one.