Charubel's image for this degree refuses to be pleasant: a butcher clothed in his working dress conducting a sheep into the slaughter-house. Nothing in the wording softens it, and interpretation should not either. The butcher is not villainous; he is dressed for work, doing a licensed and ancient trade on which the town's tables depend, and the sheep goes with him, conducted rather than dragged. The scene is necessity wearing its apron.
Read against the sixth degree of Capricorn, the zodiac's sign of unsentimental function, the image states a truth most charts are arranged to avoid: some maintenance of life is paid for in life, some roles require doing plainly what others prefer done out of sight, and the person who accepts such a role carries the town's squeamishness along with its gratitude, usually receiving more of the first. There is a second reading inside the first, since every ending deliberately administered, the closed department, the finished treatment, the ended arrangement, has a butcher and a sheep in it, and the degree asks that the office be performed cleanly, quickly and without appetite. The shadow is twofold: cruelty, the work done with relish, and hypocrisy, the town that eats the meat and despises the man. On a natal Saturn or Mars this degree tends to mark those given the necessary hard offices, surgeons, closers, executors of every kind, and its counsel is exacting: if the task is truly necessary, do it with skill and without pleasure, and if you find the pleasure arriving, put down the trade.