Taurus 20

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 large flag on a flag-staff, fixed on the top of a very high mountain. Counting from Taurus's start, this is the twentieth degree, placing it in the sign's second decan. Its decan is ruled by Mercury rather than Venus, which colors the degree with something Taurus 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. The original session behind this degree took place in 1925, when Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler drew all 360 cards blind, in Balboa Park, San Diego, one degree at a time. Jones printed his results in 1953. The phrasing that most sites and books repeat, though, comes from Dane Rudhyar's 1973 rewrite, An Astrological Mandala, which remains under copyright. As a fixed earth sign, Taurus values what endures over what merely begins, and prizes steadiness above speed. What a degree reading offers here is orientation rather than forecast, a way of naming exactly where in Taurus'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 catalogue 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 book was a late arrival in a much older project.

Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around 175, split each sign into three planetary faces, and this degree closes Taurus's second decan, still ruled by Mercury rather than by Venus, while Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately keeps this degree under Jupiter's term as well, the two ancient systems agreeing at this closing point. 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 to flag charts sharing the same close point in synastry.