An older, independent picture also sits on the second degree of Leo. Charubel, the pen name of the Welsh minister and clairvoyant John Thomas, gave nearly every one of the 360 degrees its own image in his 1898 book The Degrees of the Zodiac Symbolised, and here he saw a rostrum, the raised platform from which a speaker addresses a crowd. It is hard to imagine a more Leonine piece of furniture: the rostrum exists so that one person may stand above the assembly and be heard, and it puts the sign's appetite for self-expression into civic form, authority earned by taking the stand and holding it.
Where the 1925 Sabian image for this degree works through the body, Charubel's works through the public voice, and the two together frame Leo's opening degrees as the movement from raw vitality to declared presence. Degree by degree meaning is an old ambition. Valens assigned each ten degree face of a sign to a planet in the second century, and Ptolemy recorded the unequal bounds, but a distinct picture for every single degree first survives complete in Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum of 1494, four centuries before Charubel took up the task. This degree sits in Leo's first decan under Saturn, with the Egyptian term belonging to Jupiter until the sixth degree. Astrologers who use degree images typically read them for a natal Sun, Moon or Ascendant that falls here, or for a progressed body arriving at the degree, taking the symbol as a tone to be recognised rather than an event to be predicted.