Chickens, having gotten into something that has intoxicated them, flap wildly and dizzily in an attempt to fly, a bird not built for real flight trying anyway under the influence of something that has scrambled its coordination. Mars now rules the decan, the sign's final third, and Mars also holds the term through degree twenty-four, doubling the malefic's grip over a scene that is, fittingly, chaotic and graceless.
Jones took this from Wheeler in Balboa Park in 1925; the reading here is Rudhyar's own stated assessment, one of the relatively few degrees where his 1973 keynote names its own shadow directly rather than leaving a reader to infer one, comparing spiritual beginners to birds attempting a flight nature never equipped them for. The image does not pretend the attempt looks dignified, and neither does Rudhyar's reading of it, which is unusually candid about the clumsiness involved. Leo's confident self-belief, applied here to a bird that cannot actually fly no matter how enthusiastically it tries, is a pointed corrective to the sign's own occasional overestimate of its native capacities. Read on a natal or progressed point, the degree is kindest when taken with its own humor: beginnings in any spiritual or creative discipline look like this from the outside, and the flapping, undignified as it is, remains the only known route to eventual competence for creatures not born to the air.