Leo 14: The Bubble of Blended Colours

Charubel gives this degree one of the loveliest images in his whole catalogue: a large bubble floating on the water, in which are seen all the colours blending. John Thomas, the Welsh astrologer who published as Charubel in 1898, set an image on every degree of the zodiac, and this one earns its keep. A bubble is a whole world with almost no substance, a sphere of film that carries the entire spectrum on its skin, and it lasts exactly as long as nothing touches it.

Read against the fourteenth degree of Leo the picture holds the sign's splendour and its fragility in one object: everything iridescent about self-display, and the thinness of it, beauty that is real yet cannot bear handling. The blending of all colours also reads as inclusiveness, many lights held briefly in one round form. Degree symbolism is an old project. The second century astrologer Vettius Valens gave each sign three ten degree faces under planetary rulers, Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos preserved the unequal Egyptian bounds, and the first surviving complete set of degree pictures is Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum of 1494; the Welsh catalogue renewed the tradition four hundred years later. This degree sits in Leo's second decan under Jupiter's face with Saturn holding the term, amplitude blown against limit, which is the bubble's own physics. Where a natal or progressed point occupies the degree, the symbol is read as characterisation, and this one counsels admiring what cannot be grasped.