Aries 18

In 1925, working with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, Marc Edmund Jones drew all 360 of these degree cards blind and recorded her impressions on the spot. His book appeared in 1953. What most readers now quote, however, is Dane Rudhyar's 1973 reinterpretation from An Astrological Mandala, a text still protected by copyright and therefore not reproduced on this page. It falls in the second decan of Aries (degrees 11 to 20), and is Aries's eighteenth 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. 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 a battle-field where two contending armies are engaged in deadly conflict. 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.

A second, older picture exists for this degree. Charubel, the pen name of the Welsh minister and astrologer John Thomas, gave nearly every one of the 360 degrees its own image in 1898, decades before Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler produced the material now generally read through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement in 1925.

For this degree Charubel recorded a battlefield where two contending armies are engaged in deadly conflict, a picture of open, mutual struggle rather than a single decisive blow. That picture is independent of, and older than, the technical facts already recorded here. Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around 175, divided every 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 Mercury's bound, a table of pure rulership with no picture attached anywhere in it. The first complete run of individual degree pictures, one for all 360 points of the ecliptic, survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Latin Astrolabium Planum, safely public domain though never freely translated into English. Charubel worked apart from Angelus, and apart again from the Sabian tradition that followed him. Practically, a degree defined this narrowly is mostly used to time events through progressions reaching it exactly, or to note two charts sharing it closely enough to matter in synastry.