Taurus 6

Marc Edmund Jones assembled this degree, along with the other 359, from a 1925 sitting with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, drawing all the cards at random so nothing could be anticipated. His 1953 book set the images down for the first time. The interpretive language read today, however, belongs to Dane Rudhyar's 1973 An Astrological Mandala, still in copyright, and it is not quoted on this page.

Counting from Taurus's start, this is the sixth 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. There is an independent image for this degree from 1898, decades before the Sabian set existed. Charubel's book puts it this way: a large elliptical figure on the ground, and a man standing upright within.

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. Element and quality carry through every degree of Taurus: it is a fixed earth sign, and this degree inherits that basic temperament even as the decan and term add their own note.

A second, older picture also survives 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 large elliptical figure on the ground, with a man standing upright inside it, a picture of a boundary deliberately drawn and then occupied. 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. 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.