Pisces 14

An older, independent picture-set for the degrees exists too: John Thomas, the Welsh astrologer who wrote as Charubel, published his own image for every degree in 1898, decades before the Balboa Park session. For this degree his catalogue describes a field of ripe corn ready for the sickle. A cloudless sky and brilliant sunshine.

Counting from Pisces's start, this is the fourteenth degree, placing it in the sign's second decan. Its decan is ruled by Jupiter, Pisces's own planet, reinforcing rather than complicating the sign's usual character. The term ruler here is also Jupiter, so the finer division agrees with the decan rather than adding a separate voice. 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. Pisces closes the zodiac as mutable water, willing to dissolve a boundary that Scorpio would have defended. What a degree reading offers here is orientation rather than forecast, a way of naming exactly where in Pisces's cycle a person or moment sits.

Charubel's image for this degree is harvest under a perfect sky: a field of ripe corn ready for the sickle, a cloudless sky and brilliant sunshine. Every condition named favours the reaping. The corn is not merely growing but ready, its readiness stated twice over, ripe and ready for the sickle both, so nothing in the crop itself delays the work; the sky is cloudless and the sunshine brilliant, meaning the weather offers no obstacle either, no rain to spoil the cut grain, no cloud to slow the labour. This is harvest with every external condition aligned, a picture almost without friction.

Read at the fourteenth degree of Pisces, after a run of degrees given over to fog, gloom, distant fixed stars and unresolved blanks, the image arrives as unmistakable relief, insisting that the sign which spends so much of its territory in mist and uncertain vision also, in its due season, reaches moments of complete and uncomplicated readiness, work that simply needs doing under weather that will not fight the doing of it. A field this ready does not reward hesitation, since ripe corn left standing past its moment begins to shed or spoil regardless of how fine the sky above it remains, so the degree's clarity is also, quietly, an urgency. The shadow readings are the harvester who lets a perfect day pass unused out of habitual caution built during the foggier degrees just behind, and the harvester who forgets, in the ease of this particular season, that fog does sometimes return. On a natal Sun or Saturn this degree's counsel is plain and immediate: the field is ready and the sky is clear, so cut the corn today.