Aries 9

The image tradition for this degree goes back to 1925, to a session Marc Edmund Jones held with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, drawing all 360 cards blind and at random. Jones's book followed in 1953, though the phrasing most commonly cited now is Dane Rudhyar's, from his 1973 An Astrological Mandala, a text this page leaves unquoted because it is still under copyright. It falls in the first decan of Aries (degrees 1 to 10), and is Aries's ninth 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.

A separate nineteenth century source gives this degree its own picture. Charubel's 1898 sequence, unconnected to the later Sabian material, records a straight road, going in a direct line up to a point from which lead a number of branch roads, parting in four different directions. There is a finger-post which points but one way--the primal way, the direct one, alluded to. 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.

An older picture survives for this degree outside the tradition usually quoted. Charubel, the pen name of Welsh minister turned astrologer John Thomas, gave nearly every degree of the zodiac its own image in 1898, 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.

For this degree Charubel described a straight road running directly to a point where several branch roads part in four directions, with a finger post pointing only one way, the primal, direct route, an image about a single deliberate choice among many easier ones. Charubel developed this independently of the far older systems still recorded as fact here.

Vettius Valens, writing around 175, divided each sign into three planetary faces, leaving Mars as this degree's decan ruler, and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately assigns unequal bounds among five planets, giving this degree to Venus's term. Neither system pictured anything, only ruled it. The first complete set of individual degree pictures, one for all 360, survives whole in 1494 in Johannes Angelus's Latin Astrolabium Planum, public domain in itself though not in any later English rendering. Practically, a degree defined this precisely is mostly used to time events through progressions reaching it exactly, or to flag two charts that share it closely in synastry, both later refinements built over the antique decan and bound system.