Aries 12

Like the other 359 degrees in this set, this one goes back to 1925 and a session in Balboa Park, San Diego, where Marc Edmund Jones drew blank cards at random while the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler described what she perceived. Jones's book reached print in 1953. The phrasing most people know, though, is Dane Rudhyar's 1973 version, An Astrological Mandala, still protected by copyright and not reproduced on this page.

Counting from Aries's start, this is the twelfth 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. There is an independent image for this degree from 1898, decades before the Sabian set existed. Charubel's book puts it this way: a labyrinth. Aries opens the zodiac with unmediated initiative, action taken before it has been talked over or shaped by circumstance. Read this way, the degree is less a fortune than a location: a specific point in Aries's arc, with its own decan and term layered on top. Element and quality carry through every degree of Aries: it is a cardinal fire sign, and this degree inherits that basic temperament even as the decan and term add their own note.

A second, older picture exists for this degree, outside the tradition usually cited. Charubel, the pen name of the Welsh minister and astrologer John Thomas, catalogued a picture for nearly every one of the 360 degrees in 1898, well before the 1925 session in Balboa Park where Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler produced the material now generally read through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement.

For this degree Charubel gave only two words, a labyrinth, one of the shortest entries in his book, an image of a path that turns back on itself before it reaches its center. That spare picture predates, and stands apart from, the technical facts already recorded here. Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around the year 175, divided each sign into three planetary faces, which is why the Sun still rules this degree's decan, the second of Aries, and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately gives it to Venus's bound, a table of rulers only, with no picture attached at all. The first complete run of individual degree pictures for all 360 at once survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Latin Astrolabium Planum, public domain in itself though not in any later English translation. Charubel achieved the same thing independently, in English, and the Sabian material that followed him in 1925 is a third, separate lineage again. Practically, a degree fixed this precisely is mostly used to time events through progressions reaching it exactly, or to note two charts sharing it closely enough to matter in synastry.