The last degree of Cancer's Venus term, Mercury's decan continuing underneath it before Mercury also takes the term at fourteen, so this degree marks the point where the sign's opening third quietly finishes handing itself over to a single planet on both counts at once. A hand is held out for study, and the detail specified is the thumb, unusually prominent, offered up for the kind of scrutiny a palmist or a physiognomist might give it.
Jones took this image down from Wheeler in 1925; the reading attached to it is Rudhyar's 1973 keynote, and the choice of the thumb specifically is worth noting, since it is the digit associated in older physiognomic traditions with will and self-assertion more than any other part of the hand, which suggests either Wheeler's image or Rudhyar's later reading drew, consciously or not, on ideas already circulating about what a strong thumb was supposed to mean. The shadow, where the tradition behind the image is remembered at all, is a kind of fatalism: character read off the body rather than built through choice, the hand consulted as though it already contains the verdict. Cancer values character built through steady care rather than assertion, so a degree celebrating a forceful, self-willed thumb near the sign's own start reads as a corrective note rather than a comfortable fit.