Taurus 10

Counting from Taurus's start, this is the tenth degree, placing it in the sign's first decan. Its decan is ruled by Venus, Taurus's own planet, reinforcing rather than complicating the sign's usual character. The narrower term division belongs to Mercury, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. Taurus follows Aries by slowing the pace down into something that can be held, built and kept. An older, independent picture-set for the degrees exists too: John Thomas, the Welsh astrologer who wrote as Charubel, published his own image for every degree in 1898, decades before the Balboa Park session.

For this degree his catalogue describes a large water-wheel attached to a corn mill. Marc Edmund Jones drew this degree, with the other 359, from a shuffled deck in 1925, working with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego. His own book was not published until 1953. The version most often repeated since, though, is Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement in An Astrological Mandala, copyrighted material that this page does not reproduce. None of this is meant as prophecy; it is a way of describing where, precisely, this degree sits inside Taurus's larger pattern.

Individual degree meaning is a later layer over a much older, planet only system. Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around the year 175, divided each sign into three ten degree faces under a rotating planetary sequence, the scheme behind Venus's rule over this degree's decan, Taurus's own planet, and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately records a table of unequal bounds among five planets, giving this closing degree of the first term block to Mercury rather than to Venus, the finer division now diverging from the decan above it. Neither writer pictured a degree, only ruled it. A complete run of individual degree pictures first survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum, a Latin work safely public domain, though its old English translations are not.

The next complete English set is Welsh minister John Thomas's, writing as Charubel, whose 1898 book gives this degree a large water wheel attached to a corn mill, a picture of steady, repetitive mechanical work turning raw material into something usable. Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler produced a separate image for this same degree in 1925, now generally read through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement. In practice, this degree is mostly used to time events through a progressed Sun, Moon or angle reaching it exactly, or to flag two charts sharing it in synastry.