Virgo 17

A volcano erupts, pressure that had been building invisibly underground finally breaking the surface all at once, force that was contained becoming, in a single moment, force that is not. This is the last degree of Venus's decan and Venus's term together, both closing at exactly the same boundary before Jupiter and Mercury each take over their own separate stretch the following day.

Wheeler produced this image in the 1925 Balboa Park session; the reading here is Rudhyar's 1973 language, drawing directly on psychological vocabulary, repressed specifically, that treats the mountain as a fairly exact model for a mind that has kept something down for too long. The shadow needs no separate naming, since an eruption is already destructive by definition, whatever relief the release itself might also bring to the pressure that caused it. Virgo's disciplined self-management, usually a genuine strength, carries here its clearest cautionary counterpart in the whole sign, evidence of what accumulates when the sign's own instinct to correct and contain is never given anywhere to actually go. No town or landmark is named to locate the eruption, which keeps the image general enough to fit any mind rather than any one particular geography.

Charubel's image for this degree is a person being carried by four men in a sedan chair. John Thomas, the Welsh astrologer publishing as Charubel in 1898, gave every zodiac degree its own symbol, and this one distributes its meaning between the seated and the carrying. For the passenger the chair is honour and exemption, movement without effort, elevation sustained by other people's shoulders; for the four bearers it is coordinated labour, service that must keep step or spill its burden.

Read against the seventeenth degree of Virgo, the zodiac's sign of service, the picture cuts both ways: it dignifies the work of carrying, four skills matched to one load, and it quietly asks the occupant what entitles anyone to be carried. Dependence and support are shown as one object. Beside the eruptive force the 1925 set gives this degree, Charubel's chair is almost pointedly composed, order bearing weight over the same ground. The craft both belong to is ancient.

Vettius Valens assigned each sign three planetary faces in the second century, Ptolemy preserved the unequal Egyptian bounds, and the first complete degree picture set survives in Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum of 1494; the Welsh catalogue renewed the form for Victorian readers. This degree continues under Venus in both face and term, the chair's upholstery and the bearers' rhythm alike hers. Where natal or progressed points fall here, the tone is borne dignity, and the reading turns on which figure in the scene one is.