Cancer 18: Naming the Older Systems, and Charubel's Image

The decan and term already recorded for this degree trace to two named ancient writers. Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around the year 175, divided each sign into three ten degree faces under a rotating planetary sequence, leaving Mercury to rule this decan, the second of Cancer, and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately preserves the Egyptian bounds table, keeping this degree under Jupiter's term as well. Neither writer pictured anything, only ruled it. The first complete pictorial set for all 360 degrees survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Latin Astrolabium Planum, safely public domain but never freely translated into English.

The next complete English set is Welsh minister John Thomas's, writing as Charubel in 1898, whose entry for this degree describes a bull tossing a man on its horns, a blunt picture of sudden, violent reversal rather than a slow or gradual conflict. Practically, 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 applications considerably younger than the systems named above. A reversal this sudden is exactly the kind of image astrologers point to when explaining why the Sabian layer is read as color and emphasis on top of a chart rather than as a technique that predicts events on its own.