Individual degree meanings are a later addition to a much older, planet only system. Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around the year 175, divided each sign into three ten degree faces under a rotating planetary sequence, the scheme behind the Sun's rule over this degree's decan, the second of Aries, and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately records a table of unequal bounds among five planets, the source of the Mercury term recorded here. Neither writer pictured a degree, only ruled it. A complete set of individual degree pictures first survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum, a Latin work safely public domain, though its old English translations are not.
The next complete English set is Welsh minister John Thomas's, writing as Charubel, whose 1898 book gives this degree a settlement at the foot of a mountain, with coal pits nearby and a poor woman weeping over her newly widowed state as she nurses a baby, a starker picture of hardship than most of his entries. Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler produced an independent image for this same degree in 1925, now generally read through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement. In practice, this degree is mostly used to time events through a progressed Sun, Moon or angle reaching it exactly, or to flag two charts sharing it closely enough to matter in synastry, both modern uses over a considerably older technical base.