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Taurus 1: The Wider Degree Tradition

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Taurus 1: The Wider Degree Tradition

Assigning every one of the 360 degrees its own picture is a comparatively late idea. Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around the year 175, divided each sign into three ten degree faces and rotated a fixed sequence of planetary rulers across them, the scheme behind Venus's rule over this degree's decan, Taurus's own planet reinforcing the sign's opening third.

Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately records a table of unequal bounds shared among five planets, the source of the Venus term recorded here as well, the two systems agreeing at this particular point. Neither writer pictured a degree, only ruled it. A complete run of individual degree pictures first survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum, a Latin work safely public domain, though its old English translations are not.

The next complete English set is Welsh minister John Thomas's, writing as Charubel, whose 1898 book gives this opening degree of Taurus a black, diamond shaped figure, a stark geometric image with no narrative content at all. Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler produced a different image for this same degree in 1925, now generally read through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement. In practice, this degree is mostly used to time events through a progressed Sun, Moon or angle reaching it exactly, or to flag two charts sharing it closely enough to matter in synastry, both later refinements over a much older technical base.

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