Gemini 11: Charubel and the Older Systems Behind This Degree

The picture already quoted here is John Thomas's, the Welsh nonconformist minister, 1826 to 1908, who wrote as Charubel after turning to astrology and clairvoyance. His 1898 book gave nearly every degree its own image, well before the 1925 Balboa Park session between Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler that produced the material now generally read today through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement. Charubel's project was a late entry in a much older habit.

Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around 175, split each sign into three planetary faces, and this degree opens Gemini's second decan, ruled by Mars rather than by Mercury, which colors the degree with something Gemini does not supply on its own, while Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos keeps this degree under Jupiter's bound still, the finer division not yet matching the new decan. Neither Valens nor Ptolemy attached a picture to any of it. The first complete pictorial set for all 360 degrees survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Latin Astrolabium Planum, safely public domain but not translatable into English without the translation acquiring its own separate rights. In practice, a degree defined this precisely is mostly used to time events through progressions or synastry.