Taurus 4

Counting from Taurus's start, this is the fourth 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. As a fixed earth sign, Taurus values what endures over what merely begins, and prizes steadiness above speed. Before Jones and Wheeler ever met, the Welsh astrologer Charubel had already published a complete set of 360 degree images in 1898.

For this degree, his book pictures a ram standing alone, looking towards a flock of sheep in the distance. This is one of the 360 degree images that Marc Edmund Jones obtained in 1925 by drawing blank cards, shuffled at random, while the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler described her impressions in Balboa Park, San Diego. Jones's own account followed in 1953, but the version generally read today is Dane Rudhyar's, published in 1973 as An Astrological Mandala; that later text is under copyright until 2069 and is withheld from this page rather than quoted. 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 sits on top of 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, the scheme behind Venus's rule over this degree's decan, Taurus's own planet, and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately records a table of unequal bounds among five planets, the source of the Venus term recorded here too, the two ancient systems in agreement at this point. 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 a ram standing alone, looking toward a flock of sheep in the distance, a picture of separation from the group rather than membership in it. 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.