A Dark, Moving Column, It Stands Very High

It falls in the third decan of Taurus (degrees 21 to 30), and is Taurus's twenty fifth degree. Its decan is ruled by Saturn rather than Venus, which colors the degree with something Taurus does not supply on its own. The term ruler here is also Saturn, so the finer division agrees with the decan rather than adding a separate voice. Taurus follows Aries by slowing the pace down into something that can be held, built and kept. A picture for this degree also survives from 1898, from Charubel's own independent series, published a generation before Jones's. He recorded a dark, moving column, it stands very high.

Marc Edmund Jones drew this degree, with the other 359, from a shuffled deck in 1925, working with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego. His own book was not published until 1953. The version most often repeated since, though, is Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement in An Astrological Mandala, copyrighted material that this page does not reproduce. The value of a degree like this is less in prediction than in placement, a way of locating a moment precisely inside Taurus's broader arc. Element and quality carry through every degree of Taurus: it is a fixed earth sign, and this degree inherits that basic temperament even as the decan and term add their own note.