Taurus 12

Like the other 359 degrees in this set, this one goes back to 1925 and a session in Balboa Park, San Diego, where Marc Edmund Jones drew blank cards at random while the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler described what she perceived. Jones's book reached print in 1953. The phrasing most people know, though, is Dane Rudhyar's 1973 version, An Astrological Mandala, still protected by copyright and not reproduced on this page. It falls in the second decan of Taurus (degrees 11 to 20), and is Taurus's twelfth degree. Its decan is ruled by Mercury rather than Venus, which colors the degree with something Taurus does not supply on its own. The term ruler here is also Mercury, so the finer division agrees with the decan rather than adding a separate voice. Before Jones and Wheeler ever met, the Welsh astrologer Charubel had already published a complete set of 360 degree images in 1898.

For this degree, his book pictures a fork, resembling a farmyard implement, with four prongs. As a fixed earth sign, Taurus values what endures over what merely begins, and prizes steadiness above speed. Read this way, the degree is less a fortune than a location: a specific point in Taurus's arc, with its own decan and term layered on top.

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 fork resembling a farmyard implement, with four prongs, a plain, functional tool with no scene built around it at all. 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 falls in Taurus's second decan, ruled by Mercury rather than by Venus, while Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately keeps this degree under Mercury's term too, the two ancient divisions agreeing at this point. Neither system pictured anything, only ruled it. The first complete run of individual degree pictures, one for all 360 points of the ecliptic, 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 to note charts sharing it closely enough to matter in synastry.