A man sits with an ancient book open before him, using it to study a mandala, a diagram meant to organize and unify what might otherwise stay scattered. Both objects, book and mandala, are aids rather than the content itself; the man is working at understanding something with the help of accumulated tradition rather than devising it from nothing. Still in Mercury's decan, degrees eleven through twenty, and now also inside Mercury's term, degrees fourteen through nineteen, a doubled Mercury placement suited to a scene about study and diagrammatic reasoning.
Wheeler and Jones produced this image in one sitting in Balboa Park in 1925; the reading now on this page is Rudhyar's 1973 language, and it is a notably apt one for Rudhyar himself, who spent much of his career developing exactly this kind of psychological, whole-making astrology; a modern reader could be forgiven for wondering how much of his own project he found already latent in Wheeler's picture. The shadow is a scholar who studies integration without achieving it, a man surrounded by the tools for wholeness who remains, in the image itself, still seated in front of them rather than having arrived anywhere. Cancer's private, interior habits, working things out at home, in solitude, with old books rather than in public, are well matched to a picture of quiet, unwitnessed study.