Taurus 18

In 1925, working with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, Marc Edmund Jones drew all 360 of these degree cards blind and recorded her impressions on the spot. His book appeared in 1953. What most readers now quote, however, is Dane Rudhyar's 1973 reinterpretation from An Astrological Mandala, a text still protected by copyright and therefore not reproduced on this page. It falls in the second decan of Taurus (degrees 11 to 20), and is Taurus's eighteenth degree. 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. An older, independent picture-set for the degrees exists too: John Thomas, the Welsh astrologer who wrote as Charubel, published his own image for every degree in 1898, decades before the Balboa Park session. For this degree his catalogue describes a man beating an ass with a stick. Taurus follows Aries by slowing the pace down into something that can be held, built and kept. Read this way, the degree is less a fortune than a location: a specific point in Taurus's arc, with its own decan and term layered on top.

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 man beating an ass with a stick, a blunt picture of forced compliance rather than willing cooperation. 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 keeps this degree under Jupiter's bound as well, the two ancient systems agreeing at this point. Neither system pictured anything, only ruled it. The first complete run of individual degree pictures, one for all 360 points of the ecliptic, survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Latin Astrolabium Planum, safely public domain though never freely translated into English. Practically, a degree fixed this closely is mostly used to time events through progressions or to note charts sharing it closely enough to matter in synastry.