Pisces 6

Marc Edmund Jones assembled this degree, along with the other 359, from a 1925 sitting with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, drawing all the cards at random so nothing could be anticipated. His 1953 book set the images down for the first time. The interpretive language read today, however, belongs to Dane Rudhyar's 1973 An Astrological Mandala, still in copyright, and it is not quoted on this page.

Counting from Pisces's start, this is the sixth 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. 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 target. As the final sign, Pisces gathers what came before it and lets the edges between things blur. Read this way, the degree is less a fortune than a location: a specific point in Pisces's arc, with its own decan and term layered on top.

Charubel's image for this degree is stark in its reduction: a target. No archer is shown, no arrow in flight, no result recorded, only the marked circles themselves, waiting. A target's entire purpose is to make a diffuse intention, the wish to shoot well, into something measurable, since without the concentric rings any arrow simply lands somewhere in a field and nobody can say whether the shot was good, but with the target drawn, every arrow's distance from the exact centre becomes a fact anyone can read at a glance.

Read at the sixth degree of Pisces, a sign whose native tendency runs toward the diffuse, the oceanic and the hard to pin down, the image is a corrective borrowed from an entirely different discipline, insisting that even the most Piscean aim benefits from a drawn, visible mark to shoot at, some concrete standard against which an otherwise formless longing can actually be tested and improved. A target does not care what bow is used or how the archer feels about the shot; it simply registers where the arrow landed, and that impartial registering is precisely the discipline this sign, more comfortable with feeling than with measurement, is being offered here. The shadow readings are a target erected and never shot at, aim without practice, and shooting without ever drawing a target at all, effort with no way to know whether it is improving. On a natal Sagittarius emphasis, Jupiter or an afflicted Mercury this degree tends to mark those who need an external, honest measure for otherwise formless ambitions, and its counsel is an archer's: draw the target, then shoot at it, again and again.