Charubel's image for this degree runs against Leo's grain: a man descending a pit. John Thomas, the Welsh astrologer who published as Charubel in 1898, gave every zodiac degree an image, and where the sign's habit is ascent, display, the platform and the summit, this figure climbs down. A pit is entered for reasons: to mine, to rescue, to inspect foundations, to bury. The picture withholds the reason, and that is its force; it shows only the willed descent, light left at the rim, the self going where the Sun does not follow.
Read against the twenty eighth degree of Leo it suggests the sign's courage turned inward and downward, brilliance choosing to investigate its own underside, and it makes a sober companion to the small, high, sunlit image the 1925 set gives the same degree, descent and perch as two answers to late Leo's question of where the self should stand. The catalogue Charubel wrote belongs to an old form: Vettius Valens assigned planetary faces to each third of a sign in the second century, Ptolemy preserved the unequal Egyptian bounds, and the first complete degree picture set survives in Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum of 1494. Structurally the degree carries Mars in both face and Egyptian term, nerve for the climb down, under the Sun's sign. Where a natal placement or progression occupies the degree, the symbol is read as tone, and the tone here is deliberate descent, the willingness to go below one's own brightness.