A Man on the Ground with His Throat Cut

There is an independent image for this degree from 1898, decades before the Sabian set existed. Charubel's book puts it this way: a man on the ground with his throat cut. It falls in the second decan of Aries (degrees 11 to 20), and is Aries's twentieth degree. Its decan is ruled by Sun rather than Mars, which colors the degree with something Aries 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 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. Aries opens the zodiac with unmediated initiative, action taken before it has been talked over or shaped by circumstance. What a degree reading offers here is orientation rather than forecast, a way of naming exactly where in Aries's cycle a person or moment sits. Element and quality carry through every degree of Aries: it is a cardinal fire sign, and this degree inherits that basic temperament even as the decan and term add their own note.