Still in Saturn's decan and Jupiter's term, the second degree of Leo takes an unglamorous, almost comic turn after the first degree's dramatic surge of ambition: an epidemic of mumps, a common, rarely fatal childhood illness, spreading through a population rather than striking one person alone. Jones took this image from Wheeler in Balboa Park in 1925 exactly as it came to her, with no obvious symbolic dressing on it at all, which makes it one of the plainer, more literal cards in the whole set of 360.
The reading now attached to it, describing the spreading power of an individual crisis through a whole collectivity, is Rudhyar's 1973 gloss, and it is doing real interpretive work to lift a minor, unglamorous illness into a statement about how one person's trouble becomes everyone's; Jones's own reputation as the more grounded, clinical reader of the two makes it easy to imagine he would have stayed closer to the illness itself rather than reaching for the collective principle behind it. The shadow is built into any epidemic: containment failing, one case becoming many, a system unable to keep a private trouble private. Leo's pride in individual vitality meets, in this second degree, its opposite condition, a body's own strength undone not by a rival but by something too small to fight directly.