Charubel's 1898 image pairs two instruments in the same two hands: a set of scales, the tool of measured judgment, and a sword, the tool of enforced decision, held by one figure at once rather than by separate authorities. Neither object is shown in use; both are simply carried, weighing and cutting kept in permanent, unresolved readiness beside each other.
The combination is a genuinely uncomfortable one. Scales alone suggest patient deliberation, a verdict reached only after careful comparison; a sword alone suggests force applied without further argument. Held together, they describe a single figure who must, apparently, do both, weigh a matter fairly and then be prepared to act on the weighing with something considerably more final than words. Scorpio's own association with consequence and reckoning finds an unusually formal image here, justice pictured as an office rather than a feeling.
The phrasing now attached to this degree in general circulation traces to Dane Rudhyar's 1973 reworking of the Sabian material assembled by Marc Edmund Jones and Elsie Wheeler in 1925; that copyrighted text is not reproduced here. Within the Sun's decan and Mercury's term, clear-sightedness and articulation meet a figure who has been given both the means to judge and the means to enforce, and no image of which he chooses, or when.