An older, independent picture-set for the degrees exists too: John Thomas, the Welsh astrologer who wrote as Charubel, published his own image for every degree in 1898, decades before the Balboa Park session. For this degree his catalogue describes the sun shining brightly. Counting from Libra's start, this is the twentieth degree, placing it in the sign's second decan. 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 Jupiter, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. The original session behind this degree took place in 1925, when Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler drew all 360 cards blind, in Balboa Park, San Diego, one degree at a time. Jones printed his results in 1953. The phrasing that most sites and books repeat, though, comes from Dane Rudhyar's 1973 rewrite, An Astrological Mandala, which remains under copyright and is not reproduced here. Libra opens the second half of the zodiac and turns air's exchange into a question of balance between two parties. What a degree reading offers here is orientation rather than forecast, a way of naming exactly where in Libra's cycle a person or moment sits.