Charubel's image for this degree is heraldic: an elephant with his castle on his back. John Thomas, the Welsh astrologer publishing as Charubel in 1898, gave each degree of the zodiac a symbol, and this one carries an old pedigree of its own, the elephant and castle of medieval bestiaries, trade signs and a famous London crossroads, the war elephant bearing a fortified howdah. The picture is strength civilised into service: the greatest of land animals consenting to carry architecture, wildness made load-bearing, power that protects what rides on it.
Read against the third degree of Virgo it suggests the sign's genius for making capacity useful, the body of instinct fitted with a structure that shelters others, and the elephant's proverbial memory and patience sit comfortably in Mercury's earth sign. Against the guardian imagery the 1925 set gives this degree, Charubel's beast reads as guardianship embodied rather than attending. Degree symbolism is an old craft.
Vettius Valens gave each sign three ten degree planetary faces 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; the 1898 catalogue brought the whole form to English readers. This degree keeps the Sun's face with Mercury's term, dignity carrying intellect, the castle on the elephant again. Where natal or progressed points fall here, the image is read as tone: strength that has accepted its cargo.