Gemini 20

A long serving counter is laid out with dishes drawn from many different culinary traditions at once, offered side by side for anyone passing to choose freely among them. Dane Rudhyar's 1973 book, An Astrological Mandala, is the source of the reading generally attached to this degree, part of the same recasting that supplies the phrasing circulating for every degree in the sequence; Marc Edmund Jones's plainer 1925 original, from Elsie Wheeler's vision and published only in 1953, is not reproduced here either.

The scene works as a picture of a mind that has stopped insisting on a single cuisine of ideas, sampling instead from whatever tradition offers something useful, then combining the results into something new rather than staying loyal to any one source. This is close to the most concentrated version of Gemini's own appetite the whole sign offers, curiosity turned into an actual practice of assembly rather than mere collecting. The degree closes Gemini's second decan, ruled by Mars, and closes Mars's own term as well, which runs from the eighteenth through the twenty-fourth degree, so an unusually active stretch of the sign ends on an image of abundance gathered rather than fought for.

An older, independent picture also survives for this degree. Charubel, the pen name of the Welsh minister and astrologer John Thomas, gave nearly every one of the 360 degrees an image in 1898, decades before the 1925 Balboa Park session between Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler that produced the material now generally read through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement.

For this degree Charubel described a red tree covered with golden fruit, a vivid, almost heraldic image of abundance rendered in color rather than in narrative action. That picture sits alongside two older technical facts already carried by this degree, the last of the second decan. Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around the year 175, divided each sign into three planetary faces, leaving Mars to rule this degree's decan, and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos keeps this degree under Mars's own bound as well, the two ancient divisions agreeing here at the decan's close. Neither writer pictured anything, only assigned a ruling planet. The first complete pictorial set for all 360 degrees at once survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Latin Astrolabium Planum, safely public domain but never freely translated into English. Practically, this degree is mostly used to time events through progressions or synastry.