Aquarius 14

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 an oval-shaped mirror. Counting from Aquarius's start, this is the fourteenth degree, placing it in the sign's second decan. Its decan is ruled by Mercury rather than Saturn, which colors the degree with something Aquarius 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. Every degree in this set, including this one, comes from a single 1925 sitting: Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler, in Balboa Park, San Diego, drawing 360 blank cards in random order. Jones's book appeared in 1953, but it is Dane Rudhyar's 1973 reinterpretation, An Astrological Mandala, that is generally quoted today, and its copyrighted wording is withheld from this page. As the sign that closes the social season, Aquarius fixes its attention on the collective and on what should be true for everyone. What a degree reading offers here is orientation rather than forecast, a way of naming exactly where in Aquarius's cycle a person or moment sits. Element and quality carry through every degree of Aquarius: it is a fixed air sign, and this degree inherits that basic temperament even as the decan and term add their own note.

Charubel's image for this degree is reflection given a particular shape: an oval-shaped mirror. The shape is specified rather than left generic, and an oval mirror, unlike a plain round or square one, has a long axis and a short one, so it frames its reflection rather than simply presenting it, echoing the proportions of a standing figure or a face more closely than a perfect circle would. A mirror of any kind returns exactly what stands before it and invents nothing, and an Aquarian mirror, in a sign built on ideas about what people and societies could become, is a useful corrective object: however far its visions range, the mirror only ever shows what is actually there, not the improved version imagined for it.

Read at the fourteenth degree of Aquarius the picture asks for honest self-inspection conducted inside a frame chosen with some care, since the oval shape implies the reflection has been considered worth setting well, hung where the light falls right, kept clean enough to trust. Vanity is not automatically implied by a mirror, and this reading resists that easy shorthand, since a mirror consulted honestly is simply information, the plainest instrument there is for checking a claim against a fact. The shadow readings are opposite errors, avoidance of the glass entirely for fear of what it shows, and fixation on the glass past the point of any further useful information. On a natal Venus, Moon or Mercury this degree tends to mark clear, unflinching self-observers, and its counsel is straightforward: consult the mirror honestly, then step away from it and go do something the reflection cannot do for you.