Like the other 359 degrees in this set, this one goes back to 1925 and a session in Balboa Park, San Diego, where Marc Edmund Jones drew blank cards at random while the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler described what she perceived. Jones's book reached print in 1953. The phrasing most people know, though, is Dane Rudhyar's 1973 version, An Astrological Mandala, still protected by copyright and not reproduced on this page. It falls in the third decan of Aries (degrees 21 to 30), and is Aries's twenty seventh degree. Its decan is ruled by Venus rather than Mars, which colors the degree with something Aries does not supply on its own.
The narrower term division belongs to Saturn, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. This degree also carries an image from a different and earlier tradition. Charubel, writing in 1898, described a man in a garden, pruning some trees. As the first fire sign, Aries favors the direct move over the considered one, a readiness to act that has not yet learned patience. Taken together, the position, the decan, and the old image give this degree a specific character within Aries rather than a generic one. Element and quality carry through every degree of Aries: it is a cardinal fire sign, and this degree inherits that basic temperament even as the decan and term add their own note.