Aries 21

Marc Edmund Jones assembled this degree, along with the other 359, from a 1925 sitting with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, drawing all the cards at random so nothing could be anticipated. His 1953 book set the images down for the first time. The interpretive language read today, however, belongs to Dane Rudhyar's 1973 An Astrological Mandala, still in copyright, and it is not quoted on this page. It falls in the third decan of Aries (degrees 21 to 30), and is Aries's twenty first degree. Its decan is ruled by Venus rather than Mars, which colors the degree with something Aries does not supply on its own.

The narrower term division belongs to Mars, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. One further source stands apart from the Jones and Rudhyar material entirely. Charubel's 1898 degree symbols, compiled well before Balboa Park, give this degree a shovel standing near an open grave, in which I see a man digging. As the first fire sign, Aries favors the direct move over the considered one, a readiness to act that has not yet learned patience. Taken together, the position, the decan, and the old image give this degree a specific character within Aries rather than a generic one.

A second, older picture also survives for this degree. Charubel, the pen name of the Welsh minister and astrologer John Thomas, gave nearly every one of the 360 degrees an 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 described a shovel standing near an open grave, in which a man is seen digging, a plainer, more literal image of preparation for an ending than most of his entries allow. That picture is independent of, and older than, the technical facts already recorded here. Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around 175, divided each sign into three planetary faces, and this degree falls in the third, ruled by Venus rather than by Mars, Aries's own planet, while Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately gives it to Mars's bound, a table of pure rulership with no picture in it anywhere. 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 fixed this closely is mostly used to time events through progressions or to note charts sharing it closely enough to matter in synastry.