Taurus 24

The image tradition for this degree goes back to 1925, to a session Marc Edmund Jones held with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, drawing all 360 cards blind and at random. Jones's book followed in 1953, though the phrasing most commonly cited now is Dane Rudhyar's, from his 1973 An Astrological Mandala, a text this page leaves unquoted because it is still under copyright.

Counting from Taurus's start, this is the twenty fourth degree, placing it in the sign's third decan. Its decan is ruled by Saturn rather than Venus, which colors the degree with something Taurus does not supply on its own. The term ruler here is also Saturn, so the finer division agrees with the decan rather than adding a separate voice.

Charubel, the pen name of the Welsh astrologer John Thomas, catalogued an image for every degree in 1898. His entry for this one describes above the earth; I see the sun ascending above the horizon, while it is yet dark on that hemisphere towards which it is approaching. 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 vantage point above the earth, watching the sun ascend above the horizon while the hemisphere it is approaching is still dark, a picture of anticipation running slightly ahead of the visible event. 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 stays in Taurus's third decan, ruled by Saturn rather than by Venus, while Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos keeps this degree under Saturn's term as well, the two divisions agreeing here. Neither system pictured anything, only ruled it. The first complete run of individual degree pictures for all 360 points 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 in synastry.