Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Sabian Symbols

Libra 14

Zodiac Degree

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The wording of the Sabian symbol for this degree is not reproduced here. The phrasing in general circulation is Dane Rudhyar's, from An Astrological Mandala (1973), and stays in copyright until 2069. The atlas has withheld its own reading of the degree along with it, because that reading followed the copyrighted image closely enough to stand in for it. What remains is the degree itself, its sign, its decan and its term, which are facts about the zodiac and belong to nobody.

Facts
Correspondences
Decan Ruler
Saturn 2
Chaldean/Hellenistic decan-face order.
Term Ruler
Mercury (Libra 7-14) 1
Structure
Decan
Second Decan of Libra 2
The 11 to 20 degree arc of Libra.
Reading Keys
Term
Mercury's term (roughly the 7th-14th degree of Libra) 1
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An Innocent-Looking Woman with Fair Hair

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 an innocent-looking woman with fair hair; rather tall; she appears restless. I see a very dark-looking being behind her back. It falls in the second decan of Libra (degrees 11 to 20), and is Libra's fourteenth degree. Its decan is ruled by Saturn rather than Venus, which colors the degree with something Libra 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. Every degree in this set, including this one, comes from a single 1925 sitting: Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler, in Balboa Park, San Diego, drawing 360 blank cards in random order. Jones's book appeared in 1953, but it is Dane Rudhyar's 1973 reinterpretation, An Astrological Mandala, that is generally quoted today, and its copyrighted wording is withheld from this page. As a cardinal air sign, Libra initiates through relationship, weighing one position against another before committing. What a degree reading offers here is orientation rather than forecast, a way of naming exactly where in Libra's cycle a person or moment sits.

Libra 14: The Woman and the Dark Figure Behind Her

Charubel's image for this degree is his most unsettling in Libra: an innocent-looking woman with fair hair, rather tall, restless, and behind her back a very dark-looking being the seer glimpses but she apparently does not. The picture's machinery is position, the threat or presence located exactly where its subject cannot see, and her restlessness is the one clue that something in her knows. Read carefully, the image is about the unseen accompaniment every life carries, the shadow in the plain psychological sense, whatever follows a person that they have not turned to face, and the innocence is not spared by being genuine; it is the very thing that keeps her looking forward.

In Libra, the sign most practised at presenting a fair face and keeping the unpresentable out of view, the degree lands precisely, suggesting that what is banished from the relationship, the negotiation, the polished self, does not leave but stands behind, close enough to touch. The dark being is not described acting, which matters, since watchers are not yet assailants, and turning around remains possible at every moment of the scene. That turn is the degree's whole counsel. The shadow reading in the ordinary sense is projection, the darkness behind one person perceived vividly by everyone else and denied by her, or malice real and external, the follower who chose her, and prudence distinguishes the cases. On a natal Moon or Ascendant this degree tends to mark lives shadowed by the unexamined, and its advice is simple to say and hard to do: trust the restlessness, and look behind you.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Contained In

Source Anthology (Anthologiarum Libri Novem)Vettius Valens
Libra, Zodiac Signs
Source A History of Western AstrologyNicholas Campion
Sources
1. Tetrabiblos
Claudius Ptolemy, W. Foulsham, 1900Book IView the Source
2. Anthology (Anthologiarum Libri Novem)
Vettius Valens, B.G. Teubner, 175Book IView the Source
The Degrees of the Zodiac Symbolised
Charubel (John Thomas), 1826-1908, Nichols and Co., London, 1898the degree image for this degree, from the 1898 seriesView the Source
A History of Western Astrology
Nicholas Campion, Continuum, 2009View the Source
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