Aquarius 20

An older, independent picture-set for the degrees exists too: John Thomas, the Welsh astrologer who wrote as Charubel, published his own image for every degree in 1898, decades before the Balboa Park session. For this degree his catalogue describes a man playing a violin. Counting from Aquarius's start, this is the twentieth degree, placing it in the sign's second decan. Its decan is ruled by Mercury rather than Saturn, which colors the degree with something Aquarius 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 and is not reproduced here. Aquarius is fixed air, a stubborn commitment to an idea or a group rather than to a single feeling. What a degree reading offers here is orientation rather than forecast, a way of naming exactly where in Aquarius's cycle a person or moment sits.

Charubel's image for this degree is a single musician, undescribed beyond the instrument: a man playing a violin. No audience is mentioned, no concert hall, no accompaniment; the picture holds only the player and the instrument, which shifts the reading away from performance toward practice, a musician working alone with an instrument famous for punishing anything less than exact, patient attention to intonation. A violin has no frets to guide the fingers the way a guitar's do, so every note is found by ear and muscle memory alone, trained over years until the hand locates pitch without conscious calculation.

Read at the twentieth degree of Aquarius the image credits the sign with a discipline its reputation for sudden inspiration tends to obscure, the years of unglamorous, solitary repetition that must underlie any performance later mistaken for spontaneous genius. The violin is also, of every common instrument, one of the most capable of the human voice's own expressive range, closer to song than to mechanism once mastered, and the picture suggests that Aquarius's coolest, most systematic labour is undertaken in service of something eventually as warm and as personal as a singing line of melody. The shadow readings are technique without feeling, notes correct and nothing moved by them, and its opposite, feeling attempted before the technique exists to carry it, which a violin forgives less than almost any other instrument. On a natal Venus or Mercury this degree tends to mark disciplined, expressive artists, and its counsel is a teacher's: tune before you play, and keep tuning for as long as you play.