Cancer 16: Naming the Older Systems, and Charubel's Image

The decan and term already recorded for this degree trace to two named ancient writers rather than to unattributed convention. 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, which moves this degree into Jupiter's term, a finer division parting from the decan above it. 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 own entry for this degree is a rare blank, recorded plainly as a blank degree rather than filled with an invented scene, one of only a handful of places in his book where he chose silence over invention. Practically, this degree is still usable for timing through progressions or for comparing two charts in synastry, since both techniques work from the degree number itself.