Gemini 9

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 first decan of Gemini (degrees 1 to 10), and is Gemini's ninth degree. Its decan is ruled by Jupiter rather than Mercury, which colors the degree with something Gemini does not supply on its own.

The term ruler here is also Jupiter, so the finer division agrees with the decan rather than adding a separate voice. 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 labyrinth, situated in the heavens, and a fine silver thread suspended from it to the earth. Gemini is the zodiac's first air sign, occupied with contact, exchange, and the quick traffic of information between people. Taken together, the position, the decan, and the old image give this degree a specific character within Gemini rather than a generic one.

A second, older picture also exists 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 labyrinth situated in the heavens, with a fine silver thread suspended from it down to the earth, connecting a distant, complex origin to a single point below. 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 stays in Gemini's first decan, ruled by Jupiter rather than by Mercury, Gemini's own planet, while Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos keeps this degree under Jupiter's own bound as well, the two ancient systems agreeing here. Neither system pictured anything, only ruled it. The first complete run of individual degree pictures for all 360 points survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Latin Astrolabium Planum, safely public domain though never freely translated into English. Practically, a degree fixed this closely is mostly used to time events through progressions or synastry.