An Ancient Shepherd with Crook in Hand, Standing in the Midst

A picture for this degree also survives from 1898, from Charubel's own independent series, published a generation before Jones's. He recorded an ancient shepherd with crook in hand, standing in the midst of his flock. It falls in the second decan of Libra (degrees 11 to 20), and is Libra's eleventh degree. Its decan is ruled by Saturn rather than Venus, which colors the degree with something Libra does not supply on its own. The narrower term division belongs to Mercury, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan.

The 1925 origin of this degree is well documented: Marc Edmund Jones, working with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, drew all 360 blank cards at random and recorded her impressions as they came. Jones published the set in 1953. The wording generally read today, however, belongs to Dane Rudhyar, who reworked it in 1973 for An Astrological Mandala, a book still under copyright and not quoted here. Libra opens the second half of the zodiac and turns air's exchange into a question of balance between two parties. The point of tracking a degree this closely is not to predict an event but to place it exactly within Libra's span. Element and quality carry through every degree of Libra: it is a cardinal air sign, and this degree inherits that basic temperament even as the decan and term add their own note.