Libra 15

The wording that circulates for this cycle of 360 degree symbols traces to a 1925 session in Balboa Park, San Diego, where Marc Edmund Jones worked with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler, drawing 360 blank cards in random order while she described what came to her for each one. Jones published the results in 1953. The phrasing now most widely read is not his; it is Dane Rudhyar's, who reworked the material into his own interpretive language for An Astrological Mandala in 1973, and that 1973 text remains under copyright. It falls in the second decan of Libra (degrees 11 to 20), and is Libra's fifteenth degree. Its decan is ruled by Saturn rather than Venus, which colors the degree with something Libra does not supply on its own.

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 fat pig lying down. As a cardinal air sign, Libra initiates through relationship, weighing one position against another before committing. Taken together, the position, the decan, and the old image give this degree a specific character within Libra rather than a generic one.

Charubel's image for the middle degree of Libra is deliberately unbeautiful: a fat pig lying down. In a sign of gardens, violins and lovers' knots the pig arrives as a correction, and interpreting it honestly means letting it be exactly what it is, appetite satisfied, comfort achieved, a creature that has eaten well lying at ease with no further ambitions whatever. The picture can be read as contentment's portrait, and there is real wisdom in it: the pig is not anxious, not performing, not weighing alternatives, and its repose rebukes a sign that can starve amid options.

Satisfaction, the image says, is an actual state, reachable, bodily, and unglamorous, and some of what Libra endlessly deliberates about is available immediately to whoever will simply accept enough. But the fatness is specified, and so is the lying down, and the second reading follows: ease past its purpose, comfort become the whole of life, the settled bulk that will not rise again for anything less than the trough. Between the two readings sits the degree's question, which is Libra's own dressed in sty clothing, where is the balance point of appetite, the mean between the ascetic's scale and the glutton's. The pig, note, has no opinion; that is its peace and its limit. On a natal Venus, Moon or second house point this degree tends to mark strong appetites for comfort and a real talent for rest, and its counsel keeps both truths: learn the pig's untroubled enjoyment, and get up while getting up is still easy.