The Welsh catalogue sets this degree mid-crossing: a man wading through mud knee-deep, the opposite bank toward which he struggles enveloped in fog. Charubel, the pen name of John Thomas, published a symbol for every degree of the zodiac in 1898, and this one denies its figure both firm footing and a visible destination. Mud is the worst of both elements, earth that will not bear and water that will not carry, and the fog removes the consolation of seeing what the struggle is for.
Read against the sixteenth degree of Virgo the image is effort stripped of its usual supports, method persisting where neither ground nor goal cooperates, and its dignity is that the man is still moving. The sign's answer to the unfair crossing is simply the next step. Set against the confrontation with instinct the 1925 image stages at this degree, both pictures concern meeting what resists refinement.
Degree symbolism is an old project: Vettius Valens gave each sign three ten degree faces under planetary rulers in the second century, Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos preserved the unequal Egyptian bounds, and the first complete surviving picture set is Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum of 1494, with the 1898 catalogue renewing the craft four centuries later. This degree keeps Venus in face and term alike, grace under the mud rather than in it. Astrologers reading a natal or progressed point here take the symbol as tone, and the tone is traction, progress measured in yards through what pulls back.