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Leo 8: Charubel's Hedgehog

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Leo 8: Charubel's Hedgehog

Charubel's image for this degree is disarmingly small: a hedgehog. John Thomas, the Welsh astrologer writing as Charubel, gave every degree of the zodiac its own symbol in his 1898 book, and against Leo's lions and thrones the hedgehog reads almost as a joke until it is taken seriously. The animal's whole strategy is self-containment, softness guarded by a coat of spines, courage expressed as the refusal to be prised open rather than as attack.

For the eighth degree of the Sun's sign it suggests a self-possession that does not perform, dignity kept by boundary rather than display, and it makes an instructive contrast with the outward, activist energy the 1925 image gives the same degree. The two catalogues disagree here in exactly the way that makes owning both worthwhile. Degree meanings themselves are ancient.

Vettius Valens assigned each ten degree face of a sign to a planet in the second century, Ptolemy recorded the unequal Egyptian bounds, and a complete picture for every degree first survives in Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum of 1494; Charubel renewed that project for Victorian readers, and Sepharial's translation of the Italian La Volasfera appeared in the same volume. This degree stays under Saturn's face with Venus holding the term, both consistent with guarded warmth. Users of degree symbols read them where natal or progressed points fall, as characterisation of the degree rather than forecast.

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