A Greek muse holds golden scales, weighing newborn twins against each other, an image that borrows directly from classical mythology for its cast rather than from anything contemporary, unusual among the 360 degrees for reaching so explicitly into antiquity. Saturn rules the term here and the Moon the decan, in the second to last degree before the sign hands off entirely to Leo.
Jones took the scene from Wheeler in 1925; the reading attached to it is Rudhyar's 1973 gloss, and it treats the scales less as a verdict than as a process, weighing rather than having already weighed, judgment held open rather than delivered. The detail worth sitting with is that the two things on the scale are twins, born together, alike enough to invite comparison and yet already, by the fact of being weighed at all, being treated as separable and different. The shadow is comparison itself, twins who begin life already ranked against one another by the very instrument meant to understand them. Cancer's preoccupation with what a family produces and how its members are seen against each other gives this degree, myth and all, a recognizably domestic question at its center. In a natal chart the degree often surfaces in questions of siblings and standing, and its quiet counsel is to notice who is holding the scales before accepting the weighing as fate.