Aries 15

The wording that circulates for this cycle of 360 degree symbols traces to a 1925 session in Balboa Park, San Diego, where Marc Edmund Jones worked with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler, drawing 360 blank cards in random order while she described what came to her for each one. Jones published the results in 1953. The phrasing now most widely read is not his; it is Dane Rudhyar's, who reworked the material into his own interpretive language for An Astrological Mandala in 1973, and that 1973 text remains under copyright, so it is not reproduced here.

Counting from Aries's start, this is the fifteenth degree, placing it in the sign's second decan. Its decan is ruled by Sun rather than Mars, which colors the degree with something Aries 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. A picture for this degree also survives from 1898, from Charubel's own independent series, published a generation before Jones's. He recorded a black, or very dark, curtain, like a pall, which seems to defy my vision. As the first fire sign, Aries favors the direct move over the considered one, a readiness to act that has not yet learned patience. Taken together, the position, the decan, and the old image give this degree a specific character within Aries rather than a generic one.

A separate, older picture exists for this degree, outside the lineage usually quoted. Charubel, the pen name of the Welsh minister and astrologer John Thomas, gave nearly every degree of the zodiac its own image in 1898, well ahead of the 1925 Balboa Park session between Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler that produced the material generally read today through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement.

For this degree Charubel described a black, or very dark, curtain, like a pall, which seems to defy the viewer's vision, an image of something deliberately withheld from sight rather than simply absent. That picture predates the technical facts already recorded here. Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around 175, divided each sign into three planetary faces, and this degree falls in the second, ruled by the Sun rather than by Mars, while Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately gives it to Mercury's bound, a table of pure rulership with no image attached anywhere in it. The first complete run of individual degree pictures for all 360 points at once survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Latin Astrolabium Planum, public domain in itself though never freely translated into English. Charubel worked entirely apart from Angelus, and the Sabian tradition that followed him in 1925 is a third and separate lineage again. Practically, a degree fixed this closely is mostly used to time events through progressions reaching it exactly, or to note two charts sharing it closely enough to matter in synastry.