A Man Holding the End of a Rope in His Hand, the Other End

It falls in the first decan of Pisces (degrees 1 to 10), and is Pisces's fourth degree. Its decan is ruled by Saturn rather than Jupiter, which colors the degree with something Pisces 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. As the final sign, Pisces gathers what came before it and lets the edges between things blur.

Charubel, the pen name of the Welsh astrologer John Thomas, catalogued an image for every degree in 1898. His entry for this one describes a man holding the end of a rope in his hand, the other end out of sight in the heavens. This is one of the 360 degree images that Marc Edmund Jones obtained in 1925 by drawing blank cards, shuffled at random, while the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler described her impressions in Balboa Park, San Diego. Jones's own account followed in 1953, but the version generally read today is Dane Rudhyar's, published in 1973 as An Astrological Mandala; that later text is under copyright until 2069 and is withheld from this page rather than quoted. None of this is meant as prophecy; it is a way of describing where, precisely, this degree sits inside Pisces's larger pattern.