Aries 1

Counting from Aries's start, this is the first degree, placing it in the sign's first decan. Its decan is ruled by Mars, Aries's own planet, reinforcing rather than complicating the sign's usual character. The narrower term division belongs to Jupiter, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. As the first fire sign, Aries favors the direct move over the considered one, a readiness to act that has not yet learned patience.

A separate nineteenth century source gives this degree its own picture. Charubel's 1898 sequence, unconnected to the later Sabian material, records a man ploughing in the midst of a boundless plain. This degree belongs to the symbol set assembled by Marc Edmund Jones after a 1925 sitting with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, where all 360 degrees were drawn blind from a shuffled deck of cards. Jones's own book followed in 1953, but the interpretation most people encounter today was written afterward, by Dane Rudhyar in his 1973 An Astrological Mandala, and Rudhyar's exact phrasing is withheld here because it remains his estate's copyrighted property. The value of a degree like this is less in prediction than in placement, a way of locating a moment precisely inside Aries's broader arc.

Assigning a distinct meaning to every one of the 360 degrees is a much older habit than the Sabian set. Vettius Valens, writing in Greek in the second century, divided each sign into three ten degree faces and gave each a planetary ruler in a fixed rotation, the scheme this atlas still uses for the decan recorded at this degree.

Ptolemy, in the Tetrabiblos, recorded a separate table of unequal five planet subdivisions called bounds, the ancestor of the term ruler recorded here. Neither writer attached a picture to a degree, only a planet. That step, a specific image for every one of the 360, first appears complete in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum, a Latin work whose images are unambiguously public domain but whose usable English is not, since no old translation is free of its own copyright.

The next complete set was Welsh astrologer John Thomas, writing as Charubel, whose 1898 book The Degrees of the Zodiac Symbolised describes this degree as a man ploughing in the midst of a boundless plain, an image of patient, repetitive labor breaking new ground, well suited to the very first degree of the zodiac. Only after that, in 1925, did Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler produce the images now generally read through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement.

In practice, astrologers who use degree symbols mostly do it two ways, reading the degree a natal placement or a progressed Sun or Moon occupies, or checking whether two people's charts share a degree closely enough to be notable in synastry. Neither use belongs to classical technique; it is a twentieth century addition laid over the older, planet only decan and bound system these same degrees already carried.