Aries 3

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 Aries's start, this is the third 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. This degree also carries an image from a different and earlier tradition. Charubel, writing in 1898, described a man rushing along on horseback, sword in hand, to meet a company of armed men. 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. 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.

A separate, older picture exists for this exact point of the zodiac. John Thomas, the Welsh minister turned astrologer who wrote as Charubel, published a complete run of degree images in 1898, twenty seven years before Marc Edmund Jones sat down with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park. For this degree Charubel recorded a man rushing along on horseback, sword in hand, to meet a company of armed men, a picture of committed, headlong engagement rather than caution, matching the urgency that also marks the later material for this same point in Aries.

Charubel worked independently of any earlier system. The Hellenistic astrologer Vettius Valens, writing around the year 175, had already divided each sign into three planetary faces, and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos records a further table of unequal bounds, five planets sharing a sign in fixed spans, but neither Valens nor Ptolemy assigned an image to a degree, only a ruling planet, which is why this degree still carries Mars as its decan and Jupiter as its term regardless of which picture tradition is read. A fully pictorial set of 360 degrees, one image apiece, first survives complete in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum, a Latin work safely in the public domain.

Charubel's English version came next, and it stands or falls on its own, unconnected to the Sabian material that followed. Used in practice, a degree this specific is generally read when a progressed Sun, Moon or angle crosses it exactly, or when a chart comparison turns up two people sharing the same narrow point, a use that belongs to modern degree symbolism rather than to the older decan and bound systems it sits alongside.