Aries 8

An older, independent picture-set for the degrees exists too: John Thomas, the Welsh astrologer who wrote as Charubel, published his own image for every degree in 1898, decades before the Balboa Park session. For this degree his catalogue describes the earth covered with a deep snow; not a vestige of vegetable or animal life to be seen. It falls in the first decan of Aries (degrees 1 to 10), and is Aries's eighth degree. 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 Venus, 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. As the first fire sign, Aries favors the direct move over the considered one, a readiness to act that has not yet learned patience. What a degree reading offers here is orientation rather than forecast, a way of naming exactly where in Aries's cycle a person or moment sits.

The image already quoted for this degree is John Thomas's, the Welsh nonconformist minister, 1826 to 1908, who became an astrologer and clairvoyant under the pen name Charubel. His 1898 book, The Degrees of the Zodiac Symbolised, covers nearly all 360 degrees, published decades before Marc Edmund Jones and Elsie Wheeler produced the material now generally read through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 rewrite in 1925. Charubel's picture set was itself a late arrival in a much older habit of subdividing the degrees.

Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around 175, split each sign into three ten degree faces under a rotating planetary rulership, still recorded here as this degree's Mars decan, and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately lists unequal bounds among five planets, giving this degree to Venus's term, a table with no pictures attached to it at all. The first complete pictorial set for every degree survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum, a Latin work safely in the public domain, though its English translations are not.

Charubel worked independently of Angelus and of the Sabian material that came after him. In practice, a degree defined this narrowly is generally read against a progressed Sun, Moon or angle reaching it exactly, or against a second chart sharing the same point closely enough for synastry, uses that postdate every one of the older systems recorded above.