Aquarius 5

A separate nineteenth century source gives this degree its own picture. Charubel's 1898 sequence, unconnected to the later Sabian material, records a cherry tree in full blossom. Counting from Aquarius's start, this is the fifth degree, placing it in the sign's first decan. Its decan is ruled by Venus rather than Saturn, which colors the degree with something Aquarius does not supply on its own.

The narrower term division belongs to Mercury, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. The original session behind this degree took place in 1925, when Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler drew all 360 cards blind, in Balboa Park, San Diego, one degree at a time. Jones printed his results in 1953. The phrasing that most sites and books repeat, though, comes from Dane Rudhyar's 1973 rewrite, An Astrological Mandala, which remains under copyright and is not reproduced here. Aquarius is fixed air, a stubborn commitment to an idea or a group rather than to a single feeling. The point of tracking a degree this closely is not to predict an event but to place it exactly within Aquarius's span. 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 unclouded promise: a cherry tree in full blossom. Nothing in the picture is qualified. The tree is not merely flowering but in full blossom, every branch committed at once, and a cherry in this state is pure anticipation, since the blossom is not yet the fruit and carries no guarantee that frost, wind or a poor season will not take it before summer.

Read at the fifth degree of Aquarius, a sign more often credited with cool detachment than with this kind of open, all-at-once display, the image corrects the reputation: Aquarius's ideals, when they arrive, arrive exactly like this, a whole tree given over to one gesture, undefended and visible from a distance. Blossom of this kind is also profoundly social, since a cherry in full flower draws bees, birds and passers-by who had no part in growing it, and the degree notes that an idea or a hope displayed this openly stops belonging solely to the one who raised it. The shadow readings sit close together: blossom mistaken for fruit, the vision celebrated as though it were already the harvest, and the opposite failure, a grower so wary of frost that the tree is never allowed to flower at all. There is real risk in the picture, since a full bloom is also a full exposure, and the degree does not pretend the risk away. On a natal Venus or Jupiter this degree tends to mark generous, visible enthusiasms, and its counsel is an orchardist's: let the tree blossom completely when its season comes, and tend the ground rather than the flowers, since the fruit depends on roots the blossom cannot see.