Libra 17

One further source stands apart from the Jones and Rudhyar material entirely. Charubel's 1898 degree symbols, compiled well before Balboa Park, give this degree a horse saddled and bridled, and galloping away without a rider. Counting from Libra's start, this is the seventeenth degree, placing it in the sign's second decan. 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 Jupiter, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan.

The degree symbols themselves date to 1925, when Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler sat in Balboa Park, San Diego, and drew all 360 blank cards in random sequence so that no degree's image could be planned in advance. Jones published his findings in 1953, yet the reading in general circulation since is Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement, not Jones's own words, and Rudhyar's text is still in copyright and is not quoted on this page. As a cardinal air sign, Libra initiates through relationship, weighing one position against another before committing. The point of tracking a degree this closely is not to predict an event but to place it exactly within Libra's span.

Charubel's image for this degree is momentum without governance: a horse saddled and bridled, galloping away without a rider. The tack is the poignant detail. This is not a wild horse, it is an equipped one, prepared for partnership, reins ready for hands that are not there, and its gallop is therefore not freedom in the wilderness sense but escape from an arrangement, energy that was meant to be directed running loose with all its directing apparatus flapping.

Read against the seventeenth degree of Libra, the sign of partnership, the picture almost interprets itself: a relationship's whole structure, commitments saddled, communications bridled, and one party gone from the seat, whether thrown, dismounted or never mounted at all. More broadly the degree pictures any prepared power that has lost its guiding intelligence, the project running on after its purpose departed, the temper bolting with the manners still strapped on, the institution galloping handsomely nowhere. The image withholds blame, and honesty should too, since horses run when frightened, when hurt, or when the rider was careless, and the empty saddle indicts no one in particular. What it does insist is that the situation is unstable; a galloping horse in full tack will tangle, tire or be caught, and the only good endings involve a hand on the bridle again. The shadow is romanticising the bolt, mistaking runaway for free. On a natal Mars or seventh house point this degree tends to mark strong drives that have slipped their agreed governance, and its counsel is the horseman's calm: do not chase at a gallop, move to where the horse will circle back, and remount gently.