The Clear Blue Sky Covered with Stars

This degree also carries an image from a different and earlier tradition. Charubel, writing in 1898, described the clear blue sky covered with stars. It falls in the third decan of Libra (degrees 21 to 30), and is Libra's twenty third degree. Its decan is ruled by Jupiter rather than Venus, which colors the degree with something Libra does not supply on its own. The narrower term division belongs to Venus, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. Behind every one of these 360 degrees sits the same 1925 event: Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, drawing blank cards in random order and setting down what she saw. Jones's book came out in 1953.

What is usually quoted today, however, is Dane Rudhyar's later reworking, published in 1973 as An Astrological Mandala, a copyrighted text this page does not reproduce. As a cardinal air sign, Libra initiates through relationship, weighing one position against another before committing. The point of tracking a degree this closely is not to predict an event but to place it exactly within Libra's span. Element and quality carry through every degree of Libra: it is a cardinal air sign, and this degree inherits that basic temperament even as the decan and term add their own note.