A Man at a Desk Writing All Kinds of Hands, from the Largest

In 1925, working with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, Marc Edmund Jones drew all 360 of these degree cards blind and recorded her impressions on the spot. His book appeared in 1953. What most readers now quote, however, is Dane Rudhyar's 1973 reinterpretation from An Astrological Mandala, a text still protected by copyright and therefore not reproduced on this page. Counting from Libra's start, this is the eighteenth degree, placing it in the sign's second decan. Its decan is ruled by Saturn rather than Venus, which colors the degree with something Libra does not supply on its own.

The narrower term division belongs to Jupiter, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. Charubel, the pen name of the Welsh astrologer John Thomas, catalogued an image for every degree in 1898. His entry for this one describes a man at a desk writing all kinds of hands, from the largest hand to the most microscopic. 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.