Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Sabian Symbols

Aquarius 18

Zodiac Degree

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The wording of the Sabian symbol for this degree is not reproduced here. The phrasing in general circulation is Dane Rudhyar's, from An Astrological Mandala (1973), and stays in copyright until 2069. The atlas has withheld its own reading of the degree along with it, because that reading followed the copyrighted image closely enough to stand in for it. What remains is the degree itself, its sign, its decan and its term, which are facts about the zodiac and belong to nobody.

Facts
Correspondences
Decan Ruler
Mercury 3
Chaldean/Hellenistic decan-face order.
Term Ruler
Jupiter (Aquarius 14-20) 1
Structure
Decan
Second Decan of Aquarius 2
The 11 to 20 degree arc of Aquarius.
Reading Keys
Term
Jupiter's term (roughly the 14th-20th degree of Aquarius) 1
Learn More
A Man on Crutches

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 Aquarius's start, this is the eighteenth 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. 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 on crutches. As the sign that closes the social season, Aquarius fixes its attention on the collective and on what should be true for everyone. Read this way, the degree is less a fortune than a location: a specific point in Aquarius's arc, with its own decan and term layered on top. 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.

Aquarius 18: The Man on Crutches

Charubel's image for this degree is mobility maintained despite injury: a man on crutches. The crutches are not shown being fitted or discarded, only in use, meaning the man is neither newly hurt nor yet recovered but living, actively, inside the interval between the two. Crutches are a particular kind of aid, since they do not carry a person the way a wheelchair does but require the user's own remaining strength in the arms and the sound leg to keep moving under his own power, assistance that still demands real effort rather than replacing it.

Read at the eighteenth degree of Aquarius the picture describes a condition the sign, for all its talk of the future, rarely likes to sit with, ongoing limitation that has not resolved into either full recovery or full incapacity, requiring adapted movement rather than either heroic overcoming or resigned stillness. There is no self-pity in the image and no triumph either, only a man walking, differently than before, but walking, which the crutches make possible precisely because he has accepted using them. The degree honours the aid itself as much as the walker, since a crutch well made and well used is a genuine extension of capacity rather than an admission of its absence. The shadow readings are pride that refuses the crutch and so stops moving altogether, and dependency that keeps the crutches long after the leg beneath them has actually healed. On a natal Saturn, Chiron or an afflicted twelfth-house point this degree tends to mark real, ongoing adaptations to real limitation, and its counsel is direct: take up the crutch that lets you keep moving, and set it down the day it no longer does.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Contained In

Aquarius, Zodiac Signs
Source A History of Western AstrologyNicholas Campion
Sources
1. Tetrabiblos
Claudius Ptolemy, W. Foulsham, 1900View the Source
2. Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune
Chris Brennan, Amor Fati Publications, 2017View the Source
3. Anthology (Anthologiarum Libri Novem)
Vettius Valens, B.G. Teubner, 175View the Source
The Degrees of the Zodiac Symbolised
Charubel (John Thomas), 1826-1908, Nichols and Co., London, 1898the degree image for this degree, from the 1898 seriesView the Source
A History of Western Astrology
Nicholas Campion, Continuum, 2009View the Source

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