Aries 20

There is an independent image for this degree from 1898, decades before the Sabian set existed. Charubel's book puts it this way: a man on the ground with his throat cut. It falls in the second decan of Aries (degrees 11 to 20), and is Aries's twentieth 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 original session behind this degree took place in 1925, when Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler drew all 360 cards blind, in Balboa Park, San Diego, one degree at a time. Jones printed his results in 1953. The phrasing that most sites and books repeat, though, comes from Dane Rudhyar's 1973 rewrite, An Astrological Mandala, which remains under copyright and is not reproduced here. Aries opens the zodiac with unmediated initiative, action taken before it has been talked over or shaped by circumstance. What a degree reading offers here is orientation rather than forecast, a way of naming exactly where in Aries's cycle a person or moment sits. 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.

The picture already quoted for this degree is John Thomas's, the Welsh nonconformist minister, 1826 to 1908, who wrote as Charubel once he turned to astrology and clairvoyance. His 1898 catalogue gave nearly every degree of the zodiac its own image, well before the 1925 Balboa Park session between Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler that produced the material generally read today through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement. Charubel's book was a late arrival in a considerably older project.

Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around 175, split each sign into three ten degree faces under a rotating planetary sequence, leaving the Sun to rule 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 of rulers only, with no picture attached. The first complete pictorial set for all 360 degrees survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Latin Astrolabium Planum, safely public domain but not translatable into English without the translation acquiring its own separate rights. Charubel achieved independently, in English, what Angelus had done in Latin. In practice, a degree defined this precisely is mostly used to time events through progressions or to flag charts sharing the same close point in synastry.