Still in Mercury's decan and Mercury's term, the language of this degree turns biological and abstract at once: potentialities on many levels unfold outward from a single original germ, one small point of origin producing a branching, multiplying structure the way a seed produces a plant far larger and more elaborate than itself.
Unlike most of the 360 degrees, which picture a scene with people or animals in it, this one is closer to a diagram in words, an idea rendered directly rather than staged, and it sits among the handful of Wheeler's 1925 Balboa Park images that read more like a proposition than a picture. The interpretation on this page is Rudhyar's 1973 wording; Jones, who worked in 1953 from his own brief pencil notes and generally favored the more concrete, scenic images over the abstract ones, is on record finding degrees like this one harder to work with than those with a clear tableau in them. There is little obvious shadow in an image of pure unfolding, though potential that only ever unfolds and never resolves into a finished form carries its own quiet frustration. Cancer, the cardinal sign that starts the year's second quarter, is a fitting home for a degree about origins and germination, the sign's own governing idea, life beginning, given here in its most abstract possible form.