Gemini 12

Like the other 359 degrees in this set, this one goes back to 1925 and a session in Balboa Park, San Diego, where Marc Edmund Jones drew blank cards at random while the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler described what she perceived. Jones's book reached print in 1953. The phrasing most people know, though, is Dane Rudhyar's 1973 version, An Astrological Mandala, still protected by copyright and not reproduced on this page. It falls in the second decan of Gemini (degrees 11 to 20), and is Gemini's twelfth degree. Its decan is ruled by Mars rather than Mercury, which colors the degree with something Gemini does not supply on its own.

The narrower term division belongs to Jupiter, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. An older, independent picture-set for the degrees exists too: John Thomas, the Welsh astrologer who wrote as Charubel, published his own image for every degree in 1898, decades before the Balboa Park session.

For this degree his catalogue describes two men turning a handle of a crane from the jib of which a large chain is suspended, attached by a hook to a large stone. As a mutable air sign, Gemini adapts by multiplying its options rather than committing early to one. Read this way, the degree is less a fortune than a location: a specific point in Gemini's arc, with its own decan and term layered on top.

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 two men turning the handle of a crane, its jib carrying a large chain attached by a hook to a heavy stone, a picture of shared, mechanical effort applied to something too heavy to move alone. 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 Gemini's second decan, ruled by Mars rather than by Mercury, while Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos keeps this degree under Jupiter's bound still, the finer division not yet matching the new decan. Neither system pictured anything, only ruled it. The first complete run of individual degree pictures for all 360 points 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 synastry.