Leo 29

A mermaid rises from ocean waves, poised at the exact point of becoming ready for rebirth into human form, neither fully the sea creature she has been nor yet the person she is about to become. Mars still governs both decan and term in this second to last degree of the sign. Jones took the image from Wheeler in the 1925 Balboa Park session; the reading here is Rudhyar's 1973 language, and it treats the mermaid quite directly as a psychological figure, the sea standing for whatever lies beneath ordinary awareness and the coming transformation into a human body standing for that material finally reaching consciousness.

The shadow is a transition caught mid-way and going no further, a mermaid who never quite completes the change, feeling that surfaces without ever becoming thought a person can actually use. Leo, so oriented toward clear, finished, visible form, is given here a figure still in the act of becoming one, water sign material arriving late into a fire sign's own house, unresolved this close to the end. The waves themselves are the only setting given, no shore yet in view, which keeps the image poised at its threshold rather than resolving toward either the water she is leaving or the ground she has not yet reached.

The Welsh catalogue closes Leo's penultimate degree with a desk: a number of mathematical instruments on a table, with a large sheet of blank white paper. Charubel, the pen name of John Thomas, published an image for every degree in 1898, and this one is all potential held in order. The instruments are precision itself, compass and rule waiting in reach, and the sheet is untouched, whiteness as invitation and as demand. Nothing has been drawn; everything could be.

Read against the twenty ninth degree of Leo the scene suggests creative power at the moment before commitment, the sign's fire disciplined into draughtsmanship, glory postponed until the first line is right. It is a strikingly Saturnine picture for a solar sign, and it reads as late Leo learning that magnificence, to survive, must be designed. Charubel's desk scene belongs to a long tradition of degree meanings.

Vettius Valens gave each sign three ten degree planetary faces in the second century, Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos preserved the unequal Egyptian bounds, and the first complete surviving set of degree pictures is Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum of 1494; the 1898 catalogue, which also carried Sepharial's La Volasfera translation, renewed the form. This degree keeps Mars in both face and term, energy on the draughtsman's side of the table. Astrologers consult degree images where natal or progressed points fall, as characterisation, and this degree characterises the poised beginning, instruments ready, page still white.