A large white cross stands over the landscape, dominating it by sheer scale and visibility rather than by anything actively happening around it, a fixed marker rather than a scene in motion. Still in the Sun's decan and Mercury's term. Jones took the image from Wheeler in Balboa Park in 1925; the reading here is Rudhyar's 1973 gloss, and it reads the cross specifically through its most familiar association, sacrifice, treating a landscape-dominating monument as proof that some understanding is unavailable by any easier road.
The shadow is suffering treated as a guarantee rather than a risk, isolation that can just as easily harden a person as wisen them, with no promise built into the image that this particular cross produces the compassion Rudhyar credits it with rather than simple bitterness. Virgo's own hard-won, unglamorous competence, skill built through repeated small corrections rather than sudden revelation, is given here an unusually monumental, almost religious scale, the sign's normally modest discipline made, for one degree, as large and visible as a landmark that can be seen from anywhere in the valley. At a placement the degree tends to mark where endurance becomes visible to others, and its caution is to let the monument commemorate the suffering without recruiting more of it.