A Raven Standing on a Stone

The wording that circulates for this cycle of 360 degree symbols traces to a 1925 session in Balboa Park, San Diego, where Marc Edmund Jones worked with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler, drawing 360 blank cards in random order while she described what came to her for each one. Jones published the results in 1953. The phrasing now most widely read is not his; it is Dane Rudhyar's, who reworked the material into his own interpretive language for An Astrological Mandala in 1973, and that 1973 text remains under copyright, so it is not reproduced here. This is the closing degree of Libra, the last full measure of the sign before the zodiac moves on. Its decan is ruled by Jupiter rather than Venus, which colors the degree with something Libra does not supply on its own.

The narrower term division belongs to Mars, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. Before Jones and Wheeler ever met, the Welsh astrologer Charubel had already published a complete set of 360 degree images in 1898. For this degree, his book pictures a raven standing on a stone. Libra opens the second half of the zodiac and turns air's exchange into a question of balance between two parties. Read this way, the degree is less a fortune than a location: a specific point in Libra's arc, with its own decan and term layered on top.