Leo 2

Still in Saturn's decan and Jupiter's term, the second degree of Leo takes an unglamorous, almost comic turn after the first degree's dramatic surge of ambition: an epidemic of mumps, a common, rarely fatal childhood illness, spreading through a population rather than striking one person alone. Jones took this image from Wheeler in Balboa Park in 1925 exactly as it came to her, with no obvious symbolic dressing on it at all, which makes it one of the plainer, more literal cards in the whole set of 360.

The reading now attached to it, describing the spreading power of an individual crisis through a whole collectivity, is Rudhyar's 1973 gloss, and it is doing real interpretive work to lift a minor, unglamorous illness into a statement about how one person's trouble becomes everyone's; Jones's own reputation as the more grounded, clinical reader of the two makes it easy to imagine he would have stayed closer to the illness itself rather than reaching for the collective principle behind it. The shadow is built into any epidemic: containment failing, one case becoming many, a system unable to keep a private trouble private. Leo's pride in individual vitality meets, in this second degree, its opposite condition, a body's own strength undone not by a rival but by something too small to fight directly.

An older, independent picture also sits on the second degree of Leo. Charubel, the pen name of the Welsh minister and clairvoyant John Thomas, gave nearly every one of the 360 degrees its own image in his 1898 book The Degrees of the Zodiac Symbolised, and here he saw a rostrum, the raised platform from which a speaker addresses a crowd. It is hard to imagine a more Leonine piece of furniture: the rostrum exists so that one person may stand above the assembly and be heard, and it puts the sign's appetite for self-expression into civic form, authority earned by taking the stand and holding it.

Where the 1925 Sabian image for this degree works through the body, Charubel's works through the public voice, and the two together frame Leo's opening degrees as the movement from raw vitality to declared presence. Degree by degree meaning is an old ambition. Valens assigned each ten degree face of a sign to a planet in the second century, and Ptolemy recorded the unequal bounds, but a distinct picture for every single degree first survives complete in Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum of 1494, four centuries before Charubel took up the task. This degree sits in Leo's first decan under Saturn, with the Egyptian term belonging to Jupiter until the sixth degree. Astrologers who use degree images typically read them for a natal Sun, Moon or Ascendant that falls here, or for a progressed body arriving at the degree, taking the symbol as a tone to be recognised rather than an event to be predicted.