Aries 17

A separate nineteenth century source gives this degree its own picture. Charubel's 1898 sequence, unconnected to the later Sabian material, records a ship in mid-ocean; a boundless expanse of water. It is a merchant ship. It falls in the second decan of Aries (degrees 11 to 20), and is Aries's seventeenth degree. 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 Mercury, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan.

The degree symbols themselves date to 1925, when Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler sat in Balboa Park, San Diego, and drew all 360 blank cards in random sequence so that no degree's image could be planned in advance. Jones published his findings in 1953, yet the reading in general circulation since is Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement, not Jones's own words, and Rudhyar's text is still in copyright and is not quoted on this page. As the first fire sign, Aries favors the direct move over the considered one, a readiness to act that has not yet learned patience. 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 is John Thomas's, 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, well ahead of the 1925 Balboa Park session between Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler that produced the material now generally read through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement. Charubel's project was itself a late entry in an older habit of subdividing the degrees.

Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around 175, split 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 lists unequal bounds among five planets, giving this degree to Mercury's term, a table built purely of rulers with no image attached anywhere. The first complete pictorial set for all 360 degrees at once survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Latin Astrolabium Planum, safely public domain but never translatable into English without the translation acquiring its own separate rights. Charubel worked independently of Angelus, and the Sabian material that followed him in 1925 is a third, later lineage again. Practically, a degree defined this precisely is generally read against a progressed Sun, Moon or angle reaching it exactly, or against a second chart sharing the same point in synastry.