Capricorn 5

This degree also carries an image from a different and earlier tradition. Charubel, writing in 1898, described a very small unpretentious window in the wall of a massive tower. Counting from Capricorn's start, this is the fifth degree, placing it in the sign's first decan. Its decan is ruled by Jupiter rather than Saturn, which colors the degree with something Capricorn 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. Capricorn opens the earth triplicity's hardest test, initiating through structure, discipline, and long accountability. The point of tracking a degree this closely is not to predict an event but to place it exactly within Capricorn's span. Element and quality carry through every degree of Capricorn: it is a cardinal earth sign, and this degree inherits that basic temperament even as the decan and term add their own note.

Charubel's image for this degree is a study in proportion: a very small unpretentious window in the wall of a massive tower. The mass belongs to the tower and the meaning belongs to the window. A tower is defence, height and permanence, wall thickened until nothing uninvited can pass; a window is the deliberate exception, the one place the builder chose to let the world in. Here the exception is very small and unpretentious, admitting a little light, a narrow view, no grandeur.

Read against the fifth degree of Capricorn the picture describes a temperament and does it kindly: a life fortified by work, structure and reserve, whose openness to the world is genuine but strait, one modest aperture in a great deal of stone. The image neither mocks the wall nor flatters it. The wall is real strength, and the window is real light, and the proportion between them is the question the degree poses. A little opening in massive masonry can be enough, since a single window lights a whole stair if it is placed well, and placement, not size, is what the unpretentious excel at. The shadow is obvious and worth saying plainly, walls that keep thickening while the window stays the size it was in childhood, security outgrowing every other appetite.

On a natal Saturn, Moon or Ascendant this degree tends to mark guarded natures with one true opening, a single friendship, art or faith through which all their light arrives, and its counsel is the mason's: defend the wall if you must, but glaze the window, keep it clean, and consider, every few years, cutting it wider.