Gemini 6

Marc Edmund Jones assembled this degree, along with the other 359, from a 1925 sitting with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, drawing all the cards at random so nothing could be anticipated. His 1953 book set the images down for the first time. The interpretive language read today, however, belongs to Dane Rudhyar's 1973 An Astrological Mandala, still in copyright, and it is not quoted on this page.

Counting from Gemini's start, this is the sixth degree, placing it in the sign's first decan. Its decan is ruled by Jupiter rather than Mercury, which colors the degree with something Gemini does not supply on its own. The narrower term division belongs to Mercury, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. Before Jones and Wheeler ever met, the Welsh astrologer Charubel had already published a complete set of 360 degree images in 1898.

For this degree, his book pictures a promiscuous lot of creatures, consisting of cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry. Gemini is the zodiac's first air sign, occupied with contact, exchange, and the quick traffic of information between people. Read this way, the degree is less a fortune than a location: a specific point in Gemini's arc, with its own decan and term layered on top.

A second, older picture also exists 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 Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler produced the material now generally read through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement in 1925.

For this degree Charubel described a promiscuous lot of creatures, cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry mixed together without order, a picture of variety thrown together rather than sorted into kinds. That picture is independent of, and older than, the technical facts already recorded here. Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around 175, divided each sign into three planetary faces, and this degree stays in Gemini's first decan, ruled by Jupiter rather than by Mercury, Gemini's own planet, while Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos keeps this degree under Mercury's bound as well, the finer division returning to the sign's own ruler. Neither system pictured anything, only ruled it. The first complete run of individual degree pictures for all 360 points survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Latin Astrolabium Planum, safely public domain though never freely translated into English. Practically, a degree fixed this closely is mostly used to time events through progressions or synastry.