An older, independent picture-set for the degrees exists too: John Thomas, the Welsh astrologer who wrote as Charubel, published his own image for every degree in 1898, decades before the Balboa Park session. For this degree his catalogue describes the earth covered with a deep snow; not a vestige of vegetable or animal life to be seen. It falls in the first decan of Aries (degrees 1 to 10), and is Aries's eighth degree. Its decan is ruled by Mars, Aries's own planet, reinforcing rather than complicating the sign's usual character.
The narrower term division belongs to Venus, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. Behind every one of these 360 degrees sits the same 1925 event: Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, drawing blank cards in random order and setting down what she saw. Jones's book came out in 1953.
What is usually quoted today, however, is Dane Rudhyar's later reworking, published in 1973 as An Astrological Mandala, a copyrighted text this page does not reproduce. As the first fire sign, Aries favors the direct move over the considered one, a readiness to act that has not yet learned patience. What a degree reading offers here is orientation rather than forecast, a way of naming exactly where in Aries's cycle a person or moment sits.