Sagittarius 11

Charubel's image is a confrontation between two large predators: a lion, tail erect, running toward a panther, the encounter caught in the moment of approach rather than at its outcome. Neither animal is shown yielding; the picture holds two considerable forces on a collision course without settling which, if either, prevails.

The tail held erect is a specific detail worth noting, a sign in large cats of alertness and readiness rather than of fear, suggesting confidence rather than desperation in the charge. Sagittarius, ruled by a planet long associated with kingship and expansive confidence, finds a fitting image here in a lion committing fully to a contest whose result the picture withholds, boldness pictured as its own value regardless of what actually follows the charge.

The phrasing now attached to this degree in general circulation follows Dane Rudhyar's 1973 reworking of the 1925 material Jones and Wheeler produced. Now within the Moon's decan (11 to 20 degrees) while still inside Jupiter's term, feeling and expansive confidence combine in a picture of two powerful animals meeting head-on, resolution left entirely outside the frame.

Charubel's image for this degree is a collision of great cats: a lion, alone, tail erect, running at a panther. The two animals are old emblems of two kinds of power, the lion daylight sovereignty, open and declared, the panther the dark-coated hunter of concealment. A lion charging a panther is the open against the hidden, and the charge is the lion's, tail up, aggression announced in the whole posture.

Read against the eleventh degree of Sagittarius the picture stages the sign's characteristic campaign, truth's open war on concealment. Sagittarius is the zodiac's declarer, constitutionally offended by the covert, and the degree marks the moment declaration stops being speech and becomes charge, the pursuit of the hidden thing, the lie, the secret arrangement, the shadowed motive, by a force that refuses to fight it covertly. The lion's method is the point: it does not stalk the panther, it runs at it in the open, conviction's way of fighting, which sacrifices surprise for legitimacy. The outcome is unshown, honestly, since open force does not always catch the dark, and the lion is specified alone, because such campaigns usually begin single-handed. The shadow readings are the crusade misdirected, the panther that was only a shadow, zeal charging at darkness it never verified, and the lion's own blindness, daylight power so committed to the open that it cannot imagine its own hidden motives. On a natal Sun, Mars or ninth house point this degree tends to mark open challengers of hidden things, and its counsel is the pride's discipline: verify the panther before the charge, charge in daylight if you charge at all, and keep one eye on your own shadow, which runs beside you the whole way.