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Leo 13: The Letter Q in the Older Catalogue

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Leo 13: The Letter Q in the Older Catalogue

The structural article on this page already sets out the rulers this degree answers to, so the older picture can have the space to itself. Charubel, the pen name of Welsh astrologer John Thomas, gave every degree of the zodiac a symbol in his 1898 book The Degrees of the Zodiac Symbolised, and for Leo 13 he recorded something strange even by his standards: the letter Q appears. Nothing is happening, no scene, only a glyph, and the catalogue offers a handful of these bare letters as if the seer's screen sometimes showed writing instead of pictures. A letter invites reading rather than watching.

Q is the rarest initial in English, a circle completed and then broken by one tail stroke, and taken as an emblem it suggests the closed round of self opened at a single point, which is not a bad figure for the thirteenth degree of a sign devoted to the circle of the self. But it is fair to say the image resists interpretation, and honest to say so rather than force one. Charubel's letters have precedent of a kind: the first complete degree picture set, in Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum of 1494, mixes scenes with emblems and objects, and the second century faces of Vettius Valens attached no images at all, only planets. Practitioners who consult degree symbols where a natal or progressed point falls treat an entry like this one as they treat an unreadable dream, recording it, holding it lightly, and letting the placement itself supply the sense the glyph withholds.

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