Leo 16

The storm has already ended, and everything living answers it at once, brilliant sunshine returning across a landscape written as though relief itself were the actual weather. Jupiter still rules the decan through degree twenty, and Saturn holds the term through eighteen, its last two degrees here, hardship's ruler closing out even as the image insists the hardship is over.

Wheeler produced this scene in the 1925 Balboa Park session; the reading here, naming a surge of life and love following a major crisis, is Rudhyar's 1973 language, and it is one of the more purely celebratory keynotes in the whole run of ninety degrees this survey covers, offered without qualification or shadow attached to it in his own text. That absence of a stated shadow is itself worth flagging rather than filling in in this article's own voice; not every degree needs one invented for it, and this one, on the evidence available, appears to be read by Rudhyar as close to unreservedly positive. Leo's native confidence, its instinct that difficulty is temporary and brightness the natural, restored condition of things, is given here about as direct a picture as the whole set of 360 degrees offers, storm cloud gone and the sun, Leo's own ruler, filling the whole scene without a shadow to interrupt it.

The Welsh catalogue's image for this degree is a giant amusing himself with a child's doll. Charubel, the pen name of John Thomas, published a symbol for each of the 360 degrees in 1898, and this one is all disproportion: enormous strength occupied with a small imitation of a person, power at play with something that cannot play back. Read generously, it is gentleness, might choosing a harmless amusement; read darkly, it is the danger native to Leo's scale, other people handled as toys by a strength that means no harm and does it anyway. The doll is the tell, a person-shaped thing with no will of its own, and the degree's question is whether what the strong hand holds is really a doll or only being treated as one.

The tradition Charubel worked in is old. Vettius Valens gave each sign three planetary faces in the second century, Ptolemy recorded the unequal Egyptian bounds, and the first complete run of degree pictures survives in Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum, printed in 1494. The 1898 book, which also carried Sepharial's translation of La Volasfera, brought the practice to English readers wholesale. Structurally the degree stays in Leo's second decan under Jupiter's expansive face with Saturn holding the term, size and restraint in the same span, the giant and the stillness of the doll. Degree images are consulted where natal or progressed points fall, as a tone rather than a forecast, and this one reads as a caution about scale.