Taurus 3

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.

Counting from Taurus's start, this is the third degree, placing it in the sign's first decan. Its decan is ruled by Venus, Taurus's own planet, reinforcing rather than complicating the sign's usual character. The term ruler here is also Venus, so the finer division agrees with the decan rather than adding a separate voice.

A separate nineteenth century source gives this degree its own picture. Charubel's 1898 sequence, unconnected to the later Sabian material, records a double cross; two lines parallel in the upright, and two parallel in the horizontal. 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 double cross, two lines parallel in the upright and two parallel in the horizontal, a bare geometric figure rather than a scene with people in it. 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 the first, ruled by Venus, Taurus's own planet, while Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately gives it to Venus's bound as well, the two systems agreeing at this point in the sign. 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.