Leo 13

The wording that circulates for this degree is not the atlas's to reprint. All 360 of the images come from one sitting in Balboa Park, San Diego, in 1925, where Marc Edmund Jones drew blank cards in random order for the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler and wrote down what she reported seeing for each one. Jones published the set in 1953. The phrasing most readers now meet is not his but Dane Rudhyar's, who restated the whole cycle in his own interpretive language for An Astrological Mandala in 1973, and that text is still in copyright, so neither the picture for this degree nor the keynote attached to it is reproduced here.

What can be said belongs to the degree rather than to anyone's description of it. Counting from the start of Leo, this is the thirteenth degree, which places it in the sign's second decan, the eleven to twenty arc. That decan answers to Jupiter rather than to the Sun, so the sign's own ruler is not the first influence on the point. The narrower Egyptian term laid across the same stretch, running from the twelfth to the eighteenth degree, belongs to Saturn. Jupiter over the decan and Saturn over the term is expansion inside a boundary, and that pairing is available to a reader before any picture is introduced at all.

Leo is fixed fire, a sign that holds its ground and wants its part in things acknowledged. A degree in the second decan sits past the sign's opening assertion and short of its final reach. Read this way the degree is a location rather than a fortune: a named point with a decan ruler and a term ruler over it, usable in progressions and in synastry whatever wording one prefers for the image.

The structural article on this page already sets out the rulers this degree answers to, so the older picture can have the space to itself. Charubel, the pen name of Welsh astrologer John Thomas, gave every degree of the zodiac a symbol in his 1898 book The Degrees of the Zodiac Symbolised, and for Leo 13 he recorded something strange even by his standards: the letter Q appears. Nothing is happening, no scene, only a glyph, and the catalogue offers a handful of these bare letters as if the seer's screen sometimes showed writing instead of pictures. A letter invites reading rather than watching.

Q is the rarest initial in English, a circle completed and then broken by one tail stroke, and taken as an emblem it suggests the closed round of self opened at a single point, which is not a bad figure for the thirteenth degree of a sign devoted to the circle of the self. But it is fair to say the image resists interpretation, and honest to say so rather than force one. Charubel's letters have precedent of a kind: the first complete degree picture set, in Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum of 1494, mixes scenes with emblems and objects, and the second century faces of Vettius Valens attached no images at all, only planets. Practitioners who consult degree symbols where a natal or progressed point falls treat an entry like this one as they treat an unreadable dream, recording it, holding it lightly, and letting the placement itself supply the sense the glyph withholds.