Leo 7

The night sky itself is the image here, stars gathered into constellations and shining with a brightness the description insists on rather than leaves to be assumed, an entire degree given over to looking up rather than at any human scene. Saturn's decan and the newly begun Venus term, degrees seven through eleven, put the coldest and the warmest of the classical planets in charge of the same picture, distance and beauty read together rather than as opposites.

Wheeler produced this vision in the 1925 Balboa Park session; the reading carried here is Rudhyar's 1973 language, and it is a degree where his more mythic, psychological vocabulary, archetype specifically, sits comfortably, treating the fixed pattern of the constellations as a picture of what does not change in human nature even as everything else does. There is little shadow offered for a sky simply doing what a clear night sky does, though permanence this total can also read as remoteness, brilliance too far away to warm anyone standing under it. Leo's own light, the Sun's, is notably absent from a scene about the night sky, the fire sign here made to look up rather than to shine, admiring a brightness that is not its own.

An older image sits beneath this degree's familiar one. Charubel, the pen name of the Welsh minister John Thomas, published a symbol for every degree of the zodiac in 1898, and for Leo 7 he saw a pyramidal figure with a Maltese cross at its apex. The pyramid is the most stable form a builder can raise, broad-based and narrowing to a single point, and the cross at the summit crowns mass with meaning, matter culminating in emblem.

Read against Leo the picture suggests achievement organised toward one crowning statement, the sign's fire expressed as architecture rather than flame, and it is characteristic of Charubel's catalogue that the drama is geometric where the American set's is theatrical. Assigning sense to single degrees is an old habit. Vettius Valens gave each sign three planetary faces in the second century, Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos preserved the unequal Egyptian bounds, and the first complete run of degree pictures survives in Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum of 1494, so the Welsh catalogue closes a four hundred year gap in an older tradition.

Structurally this degree keeps Saturn's face, the builder's planet fitting the pyramid neatly, while the Egyptian term passes here to Venus, which holds the degrees from seven to eleven. In practice a degree symbol is read when a natal placement, a progressed Sun or Moon, or a synastry contact occupies the degree, taken as a tone for the placement rather than a prediction about it.