Aries 22

Counting from Aries's start, this is the twenty second degree, placing it in the sign's third decan. 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. Aries opens the zodiac with unmediated initiative, action taken before it has been talked over or shaped by circumstance.

Charubel, the pen name of the Welsh astrologer John Thomas, catalogued an image for every degree in 1898. His entry for this one describes a place of amusement with music, dancing, and singing on the programme. A very large ball-room. This degree is part of the set Marc Edmund Jones recorded in 1925 with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler, in Balboa Park, San Diego, all 360 cards drawn blind and in random order. Jones published the images in 1953.

The interpretation now in wide circulation, though, is Dane Rudhyar's from 1973, not Jones's own text, and Rudhyar's wording stays under copyright and off this page. None of this is meant as prophecy; it is a way of describing where, precisely, this degree sits inside Aries's larger pattern. 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.

Giving each degree its own individual meaning is a comparatively recent layer over a much older system of bare rulership. Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around the year 175, divided each sign into three ten degree faces under a rotating planetary sequence, the scheme behind Venus's rule over this degree's decan, the third of Aries, and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately records a table of unequal bounds among five planets, the source of the Mars term recorded here. Neither writer attached a picture to any degree, only a planet. A complete run of individual degree pictures first survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum, a Latin work safely public domain, though its old English translations are not.

The next complete English set is Welsh minister John Thomas's, writing as Charubel, whose 1898 book gives this degree a place of amusement with music, dancing and singing on the programme, a very large ballroom, a picture of organized, sociable pleasure. Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler produced a separate image for this same degree in 1925, now generally read through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement. In practice, this degree is mostly used to time events through a progressed Sun, Moon or angle reaching it exactly, or to flag two charts sharing it closely enough to matter in synastry, both later refinements over a much older technical base.