Aries 23

A picture for this degree also survives from 1898, from Charubel's own independent series, published a generation before Jones's. He recorded a comet with a very long tail, pointing towards the earth. It falls in the third decan of Aries (degrees 21 to 30), and is Aries's twenty third degree. Its decan is ruled by Venus rather than Mars, which colors the degree with something Aries does not supply on its own. The narrower term division belongs to Mars, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. Behind every one of these 360 degrees sits the same 1925 event: Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, drawing blank cards in random order and setting down what she saw. Jones's book came out in 1953.

What is usually quoted today, however, is Dane Rudhyar's later reworking, published in 1973 as An Astrological Mandala, a copyrighted text this page does not reproduce. Aries opens the zodiac with unmediated initiative, action taken before it has been talked over or shaped by circumstance. The point of tracking a degree this closely is not to predict an event but to place it exactly within Aries's span. Element and quality carry through every degree of Aries: it is a cardinal fire sign, and this degree inherits that basic temperament even as the decan and term add their own note.

The picture already quoted for this degree is John Thomas's, the Welsh nonconformist minister, 1826 to 1908, who wrote as Charubel after turning to astrology and clairvoyance. His 1898 book gave nearly every degree its own image, well before 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. Charubel's catalogue was itself a late arrival in an older habit of subdividing the degrees.

Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around 175, split each sign into three planetary faces, leaving Venus to rule this degree's decan, the third of Aries, and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately lists unequal bounds among five planets, giving this degree to Mars's term, a table built purely of rulers with no picture attached anywhere. The first complete pictorial set for all 360 degrees survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Latin Astrolabium Planum, safely public domain but not translatable into English without the translation acquiring its own separate rights. Charubel achieved independently, in English, what Angelus had done in Latin nearly four centuries earlier. In practice, a degree defined this precisely is mostly used to time events through progressions or to flag charts sharing the same close point in synastry.