Virgo 6

A merry-go-round turns, riders carried in a fixed circle that feels, from inside the ride, like real motion and real excitement even though the machine returns every rider to exactly where they started. Still in the Sun's decan and Mercury's term. Jones took this scene from Wheeler in Balboa Park in 1925; the reading here is Rudhyar's 1973 gloss, treating the ride as an early, safe rehearsal for excitement a person will later have to generate and manage without a machine doing the actual work. The shadow is motion mistaken for progress, exhilaration produced by a fixed circuit rather than by any genuine advance from where the ride began.

Virgo, a sign generally suspicious of activity that does not actually accomplish anything, is given here a degree built entirely around exactly that kind of pleasurable, circular motion, a useful, slightly uncomfortable reminder to a discerning sign that not every satisfying experience needs to lead anywhere in particular to be worth having. No single rider is picked out in the image either, which keeps the degree about the ride itself rather than about any one person's particular reason for climbing on. For a natal or progressed point the degree is gentler than Virgo expects, marking the circuits, seasonal, social or bodily, that restore precisely because they go nowhere.

Charubel's image for this degree is a workshop: a room full of machinery and jars of chemicals. John Thomas, the Welsh astrologer who published as Charubel in 1898, gave every zodiac degree its own symbol, and this one reads like Virgo furnishing its ideal interior a generation early, half engine room, half laboratory. Machinery is process made repeatable; jarred chemicals are potency labelled, shelved and kept apart until wanted. Together they picture applied knowledge, force and substance both domesticated to method.

Read against the sixth degree of Virgo the scene suggests the sign's characteristic power, transformation achieved not by inspiration but by apparatus, results that can be reproduced because the room is in order. The image is notably unpopulated, which sharpens it: the work stands ready, and the degree asks who will operate it and to what end. It makes an interesting exchange with the circling fairground machine the 1925 set gives this degree, mechanism as delight there, as competence here. The tradition of degree meanings is ancient.

Vettius Valens assigned each sign three planetary faces in the second century, Ptolemy preserved the unequal Egyptian bounds, and the first complete run of degree pictures survives in Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum of 1494; Charubel renewed the practice for Victorian readers. This degree sits under the Sun's face with Mercury holding the term, light on the workbench. Where a natal or progressed point falls here, the tone is equipped capability.