Virgo 10

Two heads look outward, past the shadows immediately around them, toward something farther off that the shadows themselves would otherwise obscure, a shared act of looking rather than a solitary one. This closes the Sun's first decan, Venus continuing to hold the term through degree seventeen. Jones took the scene from Wheeler in the 1925 Balboa Park session; the reading here is Rudhyar's 1973 language, and it does careful philosophical work, insisting that the understanding it describes does not require escaping the world of opposites, only seeing past its immediate shadow while still standing inside it.

The shadow of the image, so to speak, is a duality never actually left behind, only seen around, which is a more modest and more honest claim than a promise of full transcendence would be. Virgo closes its first decan on a notably abstract, philosophical note for a sign more often associated with concrete, practical discernment, two heads managing to see past shadow without pretending the shadow itself has disappeared. The image gives no further detail about what the two heads are actually looking at, only that it lies beyond the shadow, leaving the object of their shared attention as open as the understanding it is said to produce.

Charubel's entry for this degree is a bare emblem: the Mundane Cross. John Thomas, the Welsh astrologer who published as Charubel in 1898, gave each of the 360 degrees a symbol, most of them scenes; a few, like this, are pure diagram. In astrological usage the mundane cross is the frame of the local sky, horizon and meridian crossing at right angles to make the Ascendant, Descendant, Midheaven and lowest heaven, the four angles on which every chart is hung.

As an image for the tenth degree of Virgo it reads as orientation itself, existence gridded, the world made addressable by two perpendicular lines, which is Virgo's ambition drawn with a ruler. A cross of matter rather than of martyrdom, it fixes where things are so that work on them can begin. The bare emblem sits in an old tradition that mixed pictures with signs: the first complete degree set, Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum of 1494, alternates scenes with objects and glyphs, while the oldest structures, the second century faces of Vettius Valens and the unequal bounds in Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, attached planets to spans and pictured nothing. This degree closes the Sun's opening face of Virgo inside Venus's term, light and proportion beneath the crossing lines. Astrologers who consult degree symbols where a natal placement or progression falls will find this one austere but exact, a tone of taking one's bearings, the chart's own scaffolding shown to a sign that loves scaffolding.