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 Cancer (degrees 11 to 20), and is Cancer's twelfth degree. Its decan is ruled by Mercury rather than the Moon, which colors the degree with something Cancer 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. Charubel, the pen name of the Welsh astrologer John Thomas, catalogued an image for every degree in 1898. His entry for this one describes a cypress tree. As a cardinal water sign, Cancer initiates through feeling and memory rather than argument or force. Read this way, the degree is less a fortune than a location: a specific point in Cancer's arc, with its own decan and term layered on top. Element and quality carry through every degree of Cancer: it is a cardinal water sign, and this degree inherits that basic temperament even as the decan and term add their own note.