Charubel opens Virgo with a predation scene: a wolf carrying away a lamb. John Thomas, the Welsh astrologer who published as Charubel, gave every degree of the zodiac an image in his 1898 catalogue, and this is among his harshest, the more striking for sitting on the first degree of so orderly a sign. The wolf is efficiency without sentiment, the lamb innocence without defence, and the carrying away is already accomplished; the picture offers no rescue.
Read against Virgo's opening it suggests that the sign's work begins in an unsentimental world, discrimination made necessary because appetite is real, care made valuable because the undefended are genuinely at risk. Where the 1925 image for this degree is about seeing essentials clearly, Charubel's shows what failing to see costs. The two catalogues, half a century apart, are often best read as question and answer in this way. Degree meanings long predate both.
Vettius Valens gave each sign three ten degree faces under planetary rulers in the second century, Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos preserved the unequal Egyptian bounds, and the first complete surviving set of degree pictures is Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum of 1494. Virgo's first decan carries the Sun's face with Mercury holding the opening term, sight and analysis set to guard the fold. Astrologers consult a degree symbol where a natal or progressed point falls, reading it as tone rather than event, and this degree's tone is vigilance learned from loss.