Taurus 11

A separate nineteenth century source gives this degree its own picture. Charubel's 1898 sequence, unconnected to the later Sabian material, records a scrawl or flourish of the pen. It falls in the second decan of Taurus (degrees 11 to 20), and is Taurus's eleventh degree. Its decan is ruled by Mercury rather than Venus, which colors the degree with something Taurus does not supply on its own. The term ruler here is also Mercury, so the finer division agrees with the decan rather than adding a separate voice.

The 1925 origin of this degree is well documented: Marc Edmund Jones, working with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, drew all 360 blank cards at random and recorded her impressions as they came. Jones published the set in 1953. The wording generally read today, however, belongs to Dane Rudhyar, who reworked it in 1973 for An Astrological Mandala, a book still under copyright and not quoted here.

Taurus follows Aries by slowing the pace down into something that can be held, built and kept. The point of tracking a degree this closely is not to predict an event but to place it exactly within Taurus's span. Element and quality carry through every degree of Taurus: it is a fixed earth sign, and this degree inherits that basic temperament even as the decan and term add their own note.

The picture already quoted here is John Thomas's, the Welsh nonconformist minister, 1826 to 1908, who wrote as Charubel after turning to astrology and clairvoyance. His 1898 catalogue gave nearly every degree its own image, well before the 1925 Balboa Park session between Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler that produced the material now generally read today through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement. Charubel's book was a late arrival in a much older project.

Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around 175, split each sign into three planetary faces, and this degree opens Taurus's second decan, ruled by Mercury rather than by Venus, which colors the degree with something Taurus does not supply on its own, while Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately keeps this degree under Mercury's term as well, the two divisions agreeing here. Neither Valens nor Ptolemy attached a picture to any of it. The first complete pictorial set for all 360 degrees survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Latin Astrolabium Planum, safely public domain but not translatable into English without the translation acquiring its own separate rights. In practice, a degree defined this precisely is mostly used to time events through progressions or to flag charts sharing the same close point in synastry.