Taurus 25

It falls in the third decan of Taurus (degrees 21 to 30), and is Taurus's twenty fifth degree. 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. Taurus follows Aries by slowing the pace down into something that can be held, built and kept. A picture for this degree also survives from 1898, from Charubel's own independent series, published a generation before Jones's. He recorded a dark, moving column, it stands very high.

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. The value of a degree like this is less in prediction than in placement, a way of locating a moment precisely inside Taurus's broader arc. Element and quality carry through every degree of Taurus: it is a fixed earth sign, and this degree inherits that basic temperament even as the decan and term add their own note.

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, 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 bound as well, the two ancient systems agreeing at this point in the sign. 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 dark, moving column that stands very high, a bare, upright image with no other detail attached to it. 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.