The Sun Shining Brightly in a Cloudless Sky

One further source stands apart from the Jones and Rudhyar material entirely. Charubel's 1898 degree symbols, compiled well before Balboa Park, give this degree the sun shining brightly in a cloudless sky. It falls in the third decan of Capricorn (degrees 21 to 30), and is Capricorn's twenty third degree. Its decan is ruled by Sun rather than Saturn, which colors the degree with something Capricorn does not supply on its own. The narrower term division belongs to Saturn, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. Behind every one of these 360 degrees sits the same 1925 event: Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, drawing blank cards in random order and setting down what she saw. Jones's book came out in 1953.

What is usually quoted today, however, is Dane Rudhyar's later reworking, published in 1973 as An Astrological Mandala, a copyrighted text this page does not reproduce. As a cardinal earth sign, Capricorn begins by setting a standard it then expects itself to meet. The point of tracking a degree this closely is not to predict an event but to place it exactly within Capricorn's span. Element and quality carry through every degree of Capricorn: it is a cardinal earth sign, and this degree inherits that basic temperament even as the decan and term add their own note.