Taurus 14

There is an independent image for this degree from 1898, decades before the Sabian set existed. Charubel's book puts it this way: a dark and sombre curtain hanging from a horizontal pole which covers the mouth of a dark cavern in a rock. It falls in the second decan of Taurus (degrees 11 to 20), and is Taurus's fourteenth 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. 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. Taurus follows Aries by slowing the pace down into something that can be held, built and kept. What a degree reading offers here is orientation rather than forecast, a way of naming exactly where in Taurus's cycle a person or moment sits.

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 stays in Taurus's second decan, ruled by Mercury rather than by Venus, while Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately keeps this degree under Mercury's term as well, the two divisions still 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.