Taurus 17

A picture for this degree also survives from 1898, from Charubel's own independent series, published a generation before Jones's. He recorded a very small cottage at the base of a very high mountain, where jutting rocks appear to overhang the cottage perpetually threatening its destruction. Counting from Taurus's start, this is the seventeenth 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. The degree symbols themselves date to 1925, when Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler sat in Balboa Park, San Diego, and drew all 360 blank cards in random sequence so that no degree's image could be planned in advance. Jones published his findings in 1953, yet the reading in general circulation since is Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement, not Jones's own words, and Rudhyar's text is still in copyright and is not quoted on this page. 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.

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 Jupiter's term, the finer division parting from the decan above it. 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.