Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Sabian Symbols

Scorpio 6

Zodiac Degree

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The wording of the Sabian symbol for this degree is not reproduced here. The phrasing in general circulation is Dane Rudhyar's, from An Astrological Mandala (1973), and stays in copyright until 2069. The atlas has withheld its own reading of the degree along with it, because that reading followed the copyrighted image closely enough to stand in for it. What remains is the degree itself, its sign, its decan and its term, which are facts about the zodiac and belong to nobody.

Facts
Correspondences
Decan Ruler
Mars 2
Chaldean/Hellenistic decan-face order.
Term Ruler
Mars (Scorpio 1-7) 1
Structure
Decan
First Decan of Scorpio 2
The 1 to 10 degree arc of Scorpio.
Reading Keys
Term
Mars's term (roughly the 1st-7th degree of Scorpio) 1
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A Monster with Two Faces, Like the Ancient Janus

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 Scorpio's start, this is the sixth degree, placing it in the sign's first decan. Its decan is ruled by Mars, Scorpio's own planet, reinforcing rather than complicating the sign's usual character. The term ruler here is also Mars, so the finer division agrees with the decan rather than adding a separate voice. 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 monster with two faces, like the ancient Janus. Scorpio is fixed water, intensity held under pressure rather than let out, concerned with what lies beneath a surface. Read this way, the degree is less a fortune than a location: a specific point in Scorpio's arc, with its own decan and term layered on top.

Scorpio 6: The Two-Faced Being

Charubel's image for this degree names its own ancestor: a monster with two faces, like the ancient Janus. The comparison is the interpretation's hinge, because Janus was no monster to Rome; he was the god of doors, thresholds, beginnings and endings, honoured at every gate and in every January, his two faces the perfectly reasonable equipment of a being whose office is to look both ways at once, into the year past and the year coming, inward at the house and outward at the road. Charubel's wording holds the tension deliberately: the same double vision that is divine in a doorkeeper is monstrous in a companion, and which it is depends entirely on where the faces are worn.

Read against the sixth degree of Scorpio, the zodiac's connoisseur of hidden motives, the degree describes double-sightedness itself, the capacity to see before and behind, surface and depth, the stated and the intended, which is Scorpio's great investigative gift, and also the sign's oldest accusation, duplicity, the second face kept for other audiences. The image refuses to resolve into either compliment or indictment, and honest reading keeps both: every threshold power corrupts into two-facedness the moment the doorkeeper forgets which face is watching whom, and every integrity that insists on a single face goes blind in one direction. The shadow, then, is not the second face but its concealment.

On a natal Mercury, Ascendant or eighth house point this degree tends to mark natural sentries of transitions, people stationed at life's doors, endings, negotiations and disclosures, and its counsel is Janus's own discipline: wear both faces openly, keep them telling one truth between them, and stand in the doorway, not behind it.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Contained In

Source Anthology (Anthologiarum Libri Novem)Vettius Valens
Scorpio, Zodiac Signs
Source A History of Western AstrologyNicholas Campion
Sources
1. Tetrabiblos
Claudius Ptolemy, W. Foulsham, 1900Book IView the Source
2. Anthology (Anthologiarum Libri Novem)
Vettius Valens, B.G. Teubner, 175Book IView the Source
The Degrees of the Zodiac Symbolised
Charubel (John Thomas), 1826-1908, Nichols and Co., London, 1898the degree image for this degree, from the 1898 seriesView the Source
A History of Western Astrology
Nicholas Campion, Continuum, 2009View the Source
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The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.