Gemini 14

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 number of quadrangular figures, consisting of straight lines forming an oblong square, with two triangles on the top. It appears to assume the form of a cube. Counting from Gemini's start, this is the fourteenth degree, placing it in the sign's second decan. 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 Venus, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. Every degree in this set, including this one, comes from a single 1925 sitting: Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler, in Balboa Park, San Diego, drawing 360 blank cards in random order. Jones's book appeared in 1953, but it is Dane Rudhyar's 1973 reinterpretation, An Astrological Mandala, that is generally quoted today, and its copyrighted wording is withheld from this page. Gemini is the zodiac's first air sign, occupied with contact, exchange, and the quick traffic of information between people. What a degree reading offers here is orientation rather than forecast, a way of naming exactly where in Gemini's cycle a person or moment sits.

The picture already quoted here is John Thomas's, the Welsh nonconformist minister, 1826 to 1908, who wrote as Charubel after turning to astrology and clairvoyance. His 1898 book gave nearly every degree its own image, well before the 1925 Balboa Park session between Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler that produced the material now generally read today through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement. Charubel's project was a late entry in a much older habit.

Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around 175, split 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 Venus's bound as well, the two later divisions agreeing here even though the sign's own ruler governs neither. Neither Valens nor Ptolemy attached a picture to any of it. The first complete pictorial set for all 360 degrees survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Latin Astrolabium Planum, safely public domain but not translatable into English without the translation acquiring its own separate rights. In practice, a degree defined this precisely is mostly used to time events through progressions or synastry.