Aries 11

This degree also carries an image from a different and earlier tradition. Charubel, writing in 1898, described a man with a large telescope, which he employs chiefly in looking at things in his immediate surroundings, and what lies on the earth. The most remarkable thing is, that he is looking at the large end of the instrument. Counting from Aries's start, this is the eleventh degree, placing it in the sign's second decan. Its decan is ruled by Sun rather than Mars, which colors the degree with something Aries does not supply on its own.

The narrower term division belongs to Venus, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. The 1925 origin of this degree is well documented: Marc Edmund Jones, working with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, drew all 360 blank cards at random and recorded her impressions as they came. Jones published the set in 1953.

The wording generally read today, however, belongs to Dane Rudhyar, who reworked it in 1973 for An Astrological Mandala, a book still under copyright and not quoted here. Aries opens the zodiac with unmediated initiative, action taken before it has been talked over or shaped by circumstance. The point of tracking a degree this closely is not to predict an event but to place it exactly within Aries's span.

The picture already quoted here belongs to John Thomas, the Welsh nonconformist minister, 1826 to 1908, who wrote as Charubel after turning to astrology and clairvoyance. His 1898 book gave nearly every degree its own image, twenty seven years before Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler produced the material now generally read through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement. Charubel's set was itself a late entry in a much older habit.

Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around the year 175, divided every sign into three ten degree faces under a fixed rotating rulership, which is why the Sun still governs this degree's decan, the second of Aries, and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately assigns unequal bounds among five planets, giving this degree to Venus's term, a table built purely of rulers with no image attached. The first complete pictorial run for all 360 degrees at once survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Latin Astrolabium Planum, safely public domain but not translatable into English without a translator's own rights attaching.

Charubel worked independently of Angelus, and the Sabian material that followed him twenty seven years later drew on neither of them directly. In practice, a degree marked out this precisely is generally read against a progressed Sun, Moon or angle reaching it exactly, or against a second chart sharing the same close point in synastry, both uses considerably younger than the decan and bound system running underneath them.