This degree carries an older picture beside its familiar one. Charubel, the pen name of the Welsh astrologer John Thomas, published a symbol for every degree of the zodiac in his 1898 book The Degrees of the Zodiac Symbolised, and for Pisces 16 he saw two swords crossing each other. Crossed swords are the cartographer's mark for a battlefield and the herald's for opposition, but the image is exactly poised: two blades meeting at a point make contest, salute or guard, and nothing in the picture says which.
Read against the sixteenth degree of Pisces, a sign that dissolves boundaries rather than draws them, the crossing reads as the moment conflict becomes contact, opposition as a form of meeting. The more famous images for this degree descend from a different session entirely, the 1925 sitting in Balboa Park where Elsie Wheeler produced a scene for each of the 360 degrees with Marc Edmund Jones recording; Jones printed his account in 1953, and the wording most modern readers know is Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement in An Astrological Mandala, which remains in copyright and is not reproduced here. Charubel's set is half a century older and public domain.
Older still are the structures beneath both catalogues: Vettius Valens gave each sign three ten degree planetary faces in the second century, and this degree sits in Pisces's second decan under Jupiter, with the Egyptian bound also Jupiter's, expansion doubled beneath the crossed steel. Degree symbols are read where natal or progressed points fall, as tone rather than forecast.