Aries 7

It falls in the first decan of Aries (degrees 1 to 10), and is Aries's seventh degree. Its decan is ruled by Mars, Aries's own planet, reinforcing rather than complicating the sign's usual character. The narrower term division belongs to Venus, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. As the first fire sign, Aries favors the direct move over the considered one, a readiness to act that has not yet learned patience.

A picture for this degree also survives from 1898, from Charubel's own independent series, published a generation before Jones's. He recorded a large forest of big oaks; no underwood; all is clear beneath; hence a spacious vista presents itself, affording plenty of scope for wandering. 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. The value of a degree like this is less in prediction than in placement, a way of locating a moment precisely inside Aries's broader arc.

A separate, older tradition also pictures this degree. Charubel, the pen name of the Welsh minister and astrologer John Thomas, published an image for nearly every one of the 360 degrees in 1898, twenty seven years before Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler produced the material now generally read through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement.

For this degree Charubel recorded a large forest of big oaks, with no underwood, all clear beneath, so that a spacious vista opens up, offering plenty of scope for wandering, an image of open possibility rather than obstruction. That is a different picture from the one attached to this degree, and it comes from a wholly different lineage. The planet based systems recorded as facts here go back further still: Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around the year 175, divided every sign into three planetary faces, which is why Mars still governs this degree's decan, and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately gives it to Venus's bound, a different, older division again. Neither Valens nor Ptolemy attached a picture to any of this, only a ruling planet. The first complete run of individual degree pictures survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Latin Astrolabium Planum, safely public domain but never translated into English without the translation itself picking up fresh rights. Charubel's achievement was to do in English, independently, what Angelus had done in Latin. Practically, this degree is mostly used to time events by progression or to flag shared placements in synastry, both modern uses layered over considerably older technique.