Taurus 15

The wording that circulates for this cycle of 360 degree symbols traces to a 1925 session in Balboa Park, San Diego, where Marc Edmund Jones worked with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler, drawing 360 blank cards in random order while she described what came to her for each one. Jones published the results in 1953. The phrasing now most widely read is not his; it is Dane Rudhyar's, who reworked the material into his own interpretive language for An Astrological Mandala in 1973, and that 1973 text remains under copyright, so it is not reproduced here.

Counting from Taurus's start, this is the fifteenth degree, placing it in the sign's second decan. Its decan is ruled by Mercury rather than Venus, which colors the degree with something Taurus does not supply on its own. The narrower term division belongs to Jupiter, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. One further source stands apart from the Jones and Rudhyar material entirely. Charubel's 1898 degree symbols, compiled well before Balboa Park, give this degree a natural well surrounded with moss, low shrubs, and briars. The water is clear as crystal and cold as ice. The immediate locality is dry and barren. As a fixed earth sign, Taurus values what endures over what merely begins, and prizes steadiness above speed. Taken together, the position, the decan, and the old image give this degree a specific character within Taurus rather than a generic one.

A second, older picture also exists for this degree. Charubel, the pen name of the Welsh minister and astrologer John Thomas, gave nearly every one of the 360 degrees an image in 1898, decades before Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler produced the material now generally read through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement in 1925.

For this degree Charubel described a natural well surrounded by moss, low shrubs and briars, its water clear as crystal and cold as ice even though the ground around it is dry and barren, a picture of hidden abundance in an unpromising setting. That picture is independent of, and older than, the technical facts already recorded here.

Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around 175, divided 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 moves this degree into Jupiter's bound, the term changing hands here even though the decan does not. Neither system pictured anything, only ruled it. The first complete run of individual degree pictures for all 360 points survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Latin Astrolabium Planum, safely public domain though never freely translated into English.