Taurus 16

Counting from Taurus's start, this is the sixteenth 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. As a fixed earth sign, Taurus values what endures over what merely begins, and prizes steadiness above speed.

Charubel, the pen name of the Welsh astrologer John Thomas, catalogued an image for every degree in 1898. His entry for this one describes two acute-angled isosceles triangles, the bases of which are attached to an upright, the triangles pointing to the left. This degree belongs to the symbol set assembled by Marc Edmund Jones after a 1925 sitting with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, where all 360 degrees were drawn blind from a shuffled deck of cards. Jones's own book followed in 1953, but the interpretation most people encounter today was written afterward, by Dane Rudhyar in his 1973 An Astrological Mandala, and Rudhyar's exact phrasing is withheld here because it remains his estate's copyrighted property. None of this is meant as prophecy; it is a way of describing where, precisely, this degree sits inside Taurus's larger pattern.

Individual degree meaning is a later layer over a much older, planet only system. Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around the year 175, divided each sign into three ten degree faces under a rotating planetary sequence, and this degree falls in Taurus's second decan, ruled by Mercury rather than by Venus, while Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately keeps this degree under Jupiter's bound, the finer division diverging from the decan above it. Neither writer pictured a degree, only ruled it. A complete run of individual degree pictures first survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum, a Latin work safely public domain, though its old English translations are not.

The next complete English set is Welsh minister John Thomas's, writing as Charubel, whose 1898 book gives this degree two acute angled isosceles triangles, their bases attached to an upright and both pointing left, a bare geometric figure rather than a scene. Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler produced a separate image for this same degree in 1925, now generally read through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement. In practice, this degree is mostly used to time events through a progressed Sun, Moon or angle reaching it exactly, or to flag two charts sharing it closely enough to matter in synastry.