Cancer 7: Naming the Older Systems, and Charubel's Image

The Chaldean and Egyptian labels already attached to this degree stand for two specific ancient authors rather than an anonymous convention. Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around the year 175, divided each sign into three ten degree faces under a rotating planetary sequence, leaving Venus to rule this decan across the whole first third of Cancer, and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately preserves the Egyptian bounds table, the point where this stretch of the sign changes from Mars's term to Venus's own. Neither writer pictured anything, only ruled it. The first complete pictorial set for all 360 degrees survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Latin Astrolabium Planum, safely public domain but never freely translated into English. The next complete English set is Welsh minister John Thomas's, writing as Charubel in 1898, whose entry for this degree describes one large, ripe, richly tinted apple hanging alone from its bough, the only fruit left on the tree, a picture of a single remaining prize rather than an ordinary harvest.

In practice, this degree is mostly used to time events through progressions or synastry. None of this technical layering depends on which picture tradition, if any, a reader chooses to consult, since the decan and the term were both fixed centuries before either Charubel or the Sabian material gave the point a scene at all.