Libra 2

Charubel, the pen name of the Welsh astrologer John Thomas, catalogued an image for every degree in 1898. His entry for this one describes a man playing on a violin. Counting from Libra's start, this is the second degree, placing it in the sign's first decan. Its decan is ruled by Moon rather than Venus, which colors the degree with something Libra does not supply on its own. The narrower term division belongs to Saturn, 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. Libra opens the second half of the zodiac and turns air's exchange into a question of balance between two parties. 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. Element and quality carry through every degree of Libra: it is a cardinal air sign, and this degree inherits that basic temperament even as the decan and term add their own note.

Charubel's image for this degree is a man playing on a violin, and the instrument is the interpretation. A violin is the most relational of instruments: it has no frets, so every note's pitch is found freshly by the player's ear, tuned against itself moment to moment, and its voice is proverbially the nearest of any instrument's to the human. Played well it is intimacy made audible; played badly it is famously unbearable, and nothing between hides the difference.

Read against the second degree of Libra the picture becomes the sign's method in miniature. Harmony here is not given, it is continuously produced, by listening, by minute adjustment, by a bow arm that must press exactly enough and no more, relationship as a performed skill rather than a settled state. The player is alone, which sharpens the point: Libra's work begins as solo practice, the ear trained before the duet is attempted. There is also the tenderness of the image, a machine of wood and gut held against the neck, close to the voice, music produced at the body's own register. The shadow is performance replacing feeling, the salon player whose sweetness is technique all the way down, charm with no one inside it. On a natal Venus or Mercury this degree tends to mark social musicianship, people who tune every room they enter, and its counsel honours the craft while naming its cost: keep practising the listening, and let some notes be played for no audience at all.