Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Sabian Symbols

Aquarius 6

Zodiac Degree

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The wording of the Sabian symbol for this degree is not reproduced here. The phrasing in general circulation is Dane Rudhyar's, from An Astrological Mandala (1973), and stays in copyright until 2069. The atlas has withheld its own reading of the degree along with it, because that reading followed the copyrighted image closely enough to stand in for it. What remains is the degree itself, its sign, its decan and its term, which are facts about the zodiac and belong to nobody.

Facts
Correspondences
Decan Ruler
Venus 3
Chaldean/Hellenistic decan-face order.
Term Ruler
Mercury (Aquarius 1-7) 1
Structure
Decan
First Decan of Aquarius 2
The 1 to 10 degree arc of Aquarius.
Reading Keys
Term
Mercury's term (roughly the 1st-7th degree of Aquarius) 1
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Two Bulls Fighting

Marc Edmund Jones assembled this degree, along with the other 359, from a 1925 sitting with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, drawing all the cards at random so nothing could be anticipated. His 1953 book set the images down for the first time. The interpretive language read today, however, belongs to Dane Rudhyar's 1973 An Astrological Mandala, still in copyright, and it is not quoted on this page. It falls in the first decan of Aquarius (degrees 1 to 10), and is Aquarius's sixth degree. Its decan is ruled by Venus rather than Saturn, which colors the degree with something Aquarius does not supply on its own. The narrower term division belongs to Mercury, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. Before Jones and Wheeler ever met, the Welsh astrologer Charubel had already published a complete set of 360 degree images in 1898.

For this degree, his book pictures two bulls fighting. As the sign that closes the social season, Aquarius fixes its attention on the collective and on what should be true for everyone. Read this way, the degree is less a fortune than a location: a specific point in Aquarius's arc, with its own decan and term layered on top.

Aquarius 6: The Two Bulls

Charubel's image for this degree is contest without a referee: two bulls fighting. No cause is given, no herd is described watching, and no outcome is shown; the picture holds only the collision itself, two animals of comparable and considerable force committed entirely to the encounter. A bull fight of this kind is rarely about territory alone, since bulls contest for standing within a herd, and the winner does not merely occupy ground but changes what every other animal in the group will concede to him afterward.

Read at the sixth degree of Aquarius, a sign that likes to imagine itself above such contests, the image is a useful correction, insisting that even the most idea-driven temperament carries an animal register in which standing is settled by direct, undignified force rather than by argument. The bulls are matched, which is what makes the picture a fight and not a rout, and the degree marks situations where two comparably strong positions, people, factions or convictions cannot both continue to hold the same ground, so that some test of raw contest, however uncomfortable, becomes unavoidable. The shadow is combat for its own sake, strength expended against a rival of convenience rather than a rival of consequence. On a natal Mars this degree tends to mark decisive, head-on confrontations that settle a standing question once and for all, and its counsel is a herdsman's: let the genuinely matched contest run its course rather than intervening to protect either bull, since the herd needs the answer more than it needs the peace.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Contained In

Aquarius, Zodiac Signs
Source A History of Western AstrologyNicholas Campion
Sources
1. Tetrabiblos
Claudius Ptolemy, W. Foulsham, 1900View the Source
2. Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune
Chris Brennan, Amor Fati Publications, 2017View the Source
3. Anthology (Anthologiarum Libri Novem)
Vettius Valens, B.G. Teubner, 175View the Source
The Degrees of the Zodiac Symbolised
Charubel (John Thomas), 1826-1908, Nichols and Co., London, 1898the degree image for this degree, from the 1898 seriesView the Source
A History of Western Astrology
Nicholas Campion, Continuum, 2009View the Source
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