Cancer 3: Naming the Older Systems, and Charubel's Image

The Chaldean and Egyptian labels already attached to this degree name two specific ancient systems, each with its own author. Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around the year 175, divided each sign into three ten degree faces under a rotating planetary sequence, leaving Venus to rule this decan, the first of Cancer, and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately preserves the Egyptian bounds, a table of unequal spans he records as already old in his own day, which keeps this degree under Mars's term, one degree short of the change to Venus. Neither writer pictured anything, only assigned a ruler. 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 deep shaft descending into the earth with a balloon floating directly overhead, a picture of two opposite movements, downward and upward, occupying the same vertical line. In practice, this degree is mostly used to time events through progressions or to flag two charts sharing it in synastry.