A Man Wheeling a Barrow Load of Earth Over a Hollow Rut

The wording that circulates for this cycle of 360 degree symbols traces to a 1925 session in Balboa Park, San Diego, where Marc Edmund Jones worked with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler, drawing 360 blank cards in random order while she described what came to her for each one. Jones published the results in 1953. The phrasing now most widely read is not his; it is Dane Rudhyar's, who reworked the material into his own interpretive language for An Astrological Mandala in 1973, and that 1973 text remains under copyright, so it is not reproduced here. It falls in the third decan of Aries (degrees 21 to 30), and is Aries's thirtieth degree. Its decan is ruled by Venus rather than Mars, which colors the degree with something Aries does not supply on its own.

The narrower term division belongs to Saturn, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. Charubel, the pen name of the Welsh astrologer John Thomas, catalogued an image for every degree in 1898. His entry for this one describes a man wheeling a barrow load of earth over a hollow rut. Aries opens the zodiac with unmediated initiative, action taken before it has been talked over or shaped by circumstance. Read this way, the degree is less a fortune than a location: a specific point in Aries's arc, with its own decan and term layered on top.