Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Sabian Symbols

Capricorn 23

Zodiac Degree

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The wording of the Sabian symbol for this degree is not reproduced here. The phrasing in general circulation is Dane Rudhyar's, from An Astrological Mandala (1973), and stays in copyright until 2069. The atlas has withheld its own reading of the degree along with it, because that reading followed the copyrighted image closely enough to stand in for it. What remains is the degree itself, its sign, its decan and its term, which are facts about the zodiac and belong to nobody.

Facts
Correspondences
Decan Ruler
Sun 3
Chaldean/Hellenistic decan-face order.
Term Ruler
Saturn (Capricorn 23-26) 1
Structure
Decan
Third Decan of Capricorn 2
The 21 to 30 degree arc of Capricorn.
Reading Keys
Term
Saturn's term (roughly the 23rd-26th degree of Capricorn) 1
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The Sun Shining Brightly in a Cloudless Sky

One further source stands apart from the Jones and Rudhyar material entirely. Charubel's 1898 degree symbols, compiled well before Balboa Park, give this degree the sun shining brightly in a cloudless sky. It falls in the third decan of Capricorn (degrees 21 to 30), and is Capricorn's twenty third degree. Its decan is ruled by Sun rather than Saturn, which colors the degree with something Capricorn does not supply on its own. The narrower term division belongs to Saturn, 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 a cardinal earth sign, Capricorn begins by setting a standard it then expects itself to meet. The point of tracking a degree this closely is not to predict an event but to place it exactly within Capricorn's span. Element and quality carry through every degree of Capricorn: it is a cardinal earth sign, and this degree inherits that basic temperament even as the decan and term add their own note.

Capricorn 23: The Cloudless Sun

Charubel's image for this degree is the simplest in his whole Capricorn: the sun shining brightly in a cloudless sky. After the maze, the leaden plain, the idle pit and the dark spiral stair, the sequence arrives at weather with nothing wrong in it, and the plainness is the point. A cloudless sky offers no texture to interpret, no omen to read, no shadow to psychologise; it is illumination total and conditions perfect, and the only question it asks is what the person under it will do with a good day. That question is sharper in Capricorn than anywhere else, because the sign is organised around difficulty, its virtues are all load-bearing, and a nature built for bad weather can be genuinely disoriented by a fine morning, suspicious of ease, waiting for the cloud it believes the sky owes it.

Read against the twenty third degree, deep in the sign's third decan where the Sun itself carries the rulership, the image is best taken as permission with a schedule attached: clarity has arrived, the light is even, every object stands visible without distortion, and seasons like this exist precisely for the work that cannot be done in fog, the honest survey, the long decision, the reconciliation, the founding. The shadow readings are the two wastes of sunshine, squandering it in suspicion, and squandering it in basking, since cloudless spells end and were never a promise of permanence. There is also glare to remember, as total light flatters nothing and hides nothing, and some truths are first seen on exactly such a day. On a natal Sun or Saturn this degree tends to mark clear seasons and clear temperaments, and its counsel is a farmer's: when the sky is cloudless, do the daylight work, and do not spend noon rehearsing the return of rain.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Contained In

Source A History of Western AstrologyNicholas Campion
Sources
1. Tetrabiblos
Claudius Ptolemy, W. Foulsham, 1900View the Source
2. Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune
Chris Brennan, Amor Fati Publications, 2017View the Source
3. Anthology (Anthologiarum Libri Novem)
Vettius Valens, B.G. Teubner, 175View the Source
The Degrees of the Zodiac Symbolised
Charubel (John Thomas), 1826-1908, Nichols and Co., London, 1898the degree image for this degree, from the 1898 seriesView the Source
A History of Western Astrology
Nicholas Campion, Continuum, 2009View the Source
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The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.