Pisces 3

In 1925, working with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, Marc Edmund Jones drew all 360 of these degree cards blind and recorded her impressions on the spot. His book appeared in 1953. What most readers now quote, however, is Dane Rudhyar's 1973 reinterpretation from An Astrological Mandala, a text still protected by copyright and therefore not reproduced on this page. Counting from Pisces's start, this is the third degree, placing it in the sign's first decan. Its decan is ruled by Saturn rather than Jupiter, which colors the degree with something Pisces does not supply on its own.

The narrower term division belongs to Venus, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. 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 luminous cloud, one of the woolpack type, isolated and sailing slowly in the azure sky. The cloud suddenly opens and pours out on the earth an influence resembling a shower of pearls of variegated hue. As the final sign, Pisces gathers what came before it and lets the edges between things blur. Taken together, the position, the decan, and the old image give this degree a specific character within Pisces rather than a generic one.

Charubel's image for this degree is the most lavish in his early Pisces: a luminous cloud, one of the woolpack type, isolated and sailing slowly in the azure sky, which suddenly opens and pours out on the earth an influence resembling a shower of pearls of variegated hue. A woolpack cloud is the rounded, heaped kind, and this one is isolated, alone in an otherwise clear azure sky, sailing slowly rather than racing, so its eventual opening arrives as a surprise from an apparently gentle source. What pours from it is not rain but an influence resembling pearls, varied in colour, a shower explicitly likened to something precious descending rather than merely wet weather passing over.

Read at the third degree of Pisces the image is among the clearest statements in the whole catalogue of the sign's belief in grace arriving unearned from a source that gave no obvious warning of its bounty, a single unremarkable seeming cloud found, on inspection, to hold treasure inside its ordinary looking mass. The variegated hue of the pearls matters, since a shower of one uniform colour would read as simple gift, while variety suggests the influence is not identical for every recipient, falling differently depending on what ground it lands on. The shadow readings are waiting passively under every passing cloud in hope of pearls that were never going to fall from it, and receiving a genuine shower without troubling to gather any of what has fallen. On a natal Neptune or Jupiter this degree tends to mark those touched by real, if intermittent, grace, and its counsel is a gatherer's: when the cloud opens, go out and collect what it gives.