A merry-go-round turns, riders carried in a fixed circle that feels, from inside the ride, like real motion and real excitement even though the machine returns every rider to exactly where they started. Still in the Sun's decan and Mercury's term. Jones took this scene from Wheeler in Balboa Park in 1925; the reading here is Rudhyar's 1973 gloss, treating the ride as an early, safe rehearsal for excitement a person will later have to generate and manage without a machine doing the actual work. The shadow is motion mistaken for progress, exhilaration produced by a fixed circuit rather than by any genuine advance from where the ride began.
Virgo, a sign generally suspicious of activity that does not actually accomplish anything, is given here a degree built entirely around exactly that kind of pleasurable, circular motion, a useful, slightly uncomfortable reminder to a discerning sign that not every satisfying experience needs to lead anywhere in particular to be worth having. No single rider is picked out in the image either, which keeps the degree about the ride itself rather than about any one person's particular reason for climbing on. For a natal or progressed point the degree is gentler than Virgo expects, marking the circuits, seasonal, social or bodily, that restore precisely because they go nowhere.