The Sabian picture is not the only image this degree has carried. In 1898 the Welsh astrologer John Thomas, writing under the name Charubel, published a symbol for every degree of the zodiac in The Degrees of the Zodiac Symbolised, and for the first degree of Leo he recorded an obelisk. Where the 1925 American image is all surging vitality, Charubel's is a single upright stone, a monument that concentrates attention on one vertical line, and the two readings agree more than they first appear to: each takes Leo's opening degree as a declaration, energy or stone gathered into one unmistakable assertion of presence. An obelisk is also a sun marker, raised in Egypt to the solar god and used ever since to cast the day's first and longest shadows, a fitting emblem for the first degree of the Sun's own sign. The habit of giving every degree its own meaning is far older than either man.
Vettius Valens, writing in Greek in the second century, divided each sign into three ten degree faces with a planetary ruler apiece, and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos preserved the unequal five part divisions called bounds, though neither attached a picture to a single degree. This degree keeps Saturn as its face ruler and Jupiter as its Egyptian term, structure and expansion both laid beneath the Sun's fire. In practice a degree symbol of either lineage is consulted when a natal placement, a progressed Sun or Moon, or a shared synastry point falls here, and is read as orientation rather than forecast.