Pisces 5

A picture for this degree also survives from 1898, from Charubel's own independent series, published a generation before Jones's. He recorded a black pall suspended, and a man in a gloomy enclosure looking at it despairingly; finally he musters courage to lift the pall, and enters a dark passage, which, however, finally conducts him into the light of a glorious day. Counting from Pisces's start, this is the fifth degree, placing it in the sign's first decan. Its decan is ruled by Saturn rather than Jupiter, which colors the degree with something Pisces does not supply on its own.

The narrower term division belongs to Venus, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. The original session behind this degree took place in 1925, when Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler drew all 360 cards blind, in Balboa Park, San Diego, one degree at a time. Jones printed his results in 1953. The phrasing that most sites and books repeat, though, comes from Dane Rudhyar's 1973 rewrite, An Astrological Mandala, which remains under copyright and is not reproduced here. Pisces closes the zodiac as mutable water, willing to dissolve a boundary that Scorpio would have defended. The point of tracking a degree this closely is not to predict an event but to place it exactly within Pisces's span.

Charubel's image for this degree is the fullest narrative in his Pisces: a black pall suspended, and a man in a gloomy enclosure looking at it despairingly; finally he musters courage to lift the pall, and enters a dark passage, which, however, finally conducts him into the light of a glorious day. The sequence has three distinct movements and each earns its place. First comes pure despair, a man enclosed in gloom, facing a black pall, the cloth traditionally laid over a coffin, without yet moving toward or away from it. Then comes an act of will explicitly named courage, not relief arriving from outside but a mustering from within that is required before anything else in the sequence can proceed. Only after that effort does the passage open, and even then it is dark before it is anything else, offering no immediate reward for the courage just spent.

Read at the fifth degree of Pisces the picture states the sign's whole theology of despair in miniature, insisting that the glorious day at the far end genuinely exists, is not invented consolation, but insisting equally that it is reached only by lifting the very pall the despairing man would rather leave hanging, and only by walking, unrewarded for a while, through a passage that stays dark before it opens into light. Nothing shortens the middle darkness in the image; the passage is still dark, however finally it resolves. The shadow readings are refusing ever to lift the pall, and expecting the light immediately upon lifting it, skipping the dark passage the story insists on. On a natal Pluto, Saturn or Neptune this degree's counsel is exact: lift it yourself, then keep walking through what is still dark.