Three Hundred and Sixty Pictures, One to a Degree

The core of the book is a sequence with no gaps in it. Every degree of the zodiac, from the first of Aries to the last of Pisces, is given an image: a figure, an animal, an object or a small scene, described in a few words of Latin and accompanied by a woodcut. The images are not illustrations of the sign they fall in.

A degree of Cancer may show a man with a bow, a degree of Capricorn a woman at a loom, with nothing tying the picture to the sign's usual attributes. That independence is what made the set useful and what makes its origin hard to trace. A system where each degree carries its own character allows an astrologer to say something about a chart position that the sign, the house and the planet together do not say, which is a genuine addition to the technique. It also means the images cannot be reconstructed from first principles if a copy is corrupt, because there is no rule generating them. The volume around them is a working handbook, with the house tables and the astrolabe instructions its title advertises, the sort of apparatus a fifteenth century astrologer needed at the desk. Those parts were superseded within a generation and forgotten. The degree images were not, and the book is now remembered almost entirely for the section that is least like the rest of it.