Aries 24

The image tradition for this degree goes back to 1925, to a session Marc Edmund Jones held with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, drawing all 360 cards blind and at random. Jones's book followed in 1953, though the phrasing most commonly cited now is Dane Rudhyar's, from his 1973 An Astrological Mandala, a text this page leaves unquoted because it is still under copyright. It falls in the third decan of Aries (degrees 21 to 30), and is Aries's twenty fourth 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. An older, independent picture-set for the degrees exists too: John Thomas, the Welsh astrologer who wrote as Charubel, published his own image for every degree in 1898, decades before the Balboa Park session.

For this degree his catalogue describes a green field surrounded by shrubberies; a nice villa on the north-east side of the field. As the first fire sign, Aries favors the direct move over the considered one, a readiness to act that has not yet learned patience. 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 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 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.

For this degree Charubel described a green field surrounded by shrubberies, with a pleasant villa on the field's north east side, a settled, cultivated picture of comfort rather than struggle. 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.