Virgo 3

The third degree of Virgo comes from the 1925 series that Marc Edmund Jones recorded from the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler at Balboa Park in San Diego. The wording that circulates for this degree is Dane Rudhyar's, published in 1973 and in copyright until 2069, and the atlas withholds it here as it does on the degree's own entry. The structure of the position is a different matter and is freely describable, because it belongs to the zodiac rather than to any author.

Virgo's first decan, degrees one to ten, is given to the Sun under the older system of faces, and the Egyptian bound covering the first seven degrees belongs to Mercury, which also rules the sign. So this degree carries Mercury twice over, as sign ruler and as bound ruler, with the Sun laid across it as face. That is an unusually coherent signature. Mercury doubled is the analytical faculty at full strength, the habit of examining, sorting and checking, and the Sun in the face gives that habit a centre and a steadiness it does not always have in Virgo. The sign's characteristic anxiety is least pronounced across this arc, because the solar face settles what Mercury would otherwise keep turning over.

At a placement the reading is early Virgo at its most self possessed: discernment that is not yet worrying, attention that has somewhere to rest. The second article on this page turns to the Welsh catalogue of 1898, whose picture for this degree is long out of copyright and is set out there in full.

Charubel's image for this degree is heraldic: an elephant with his castle on his back. John Thomas, the Welsh astrologer publishing as Charubel in 1898, gave each degree of the zodiac a symbol, and this one carries an old pedigree of its own, the elephant and castle of medieval bestiaries, trade signs and a famous London crossroads, the war elephant bearing a fortified howdah. The picture is strength civilised into service: the greatest of land animals consenting to carry architecture, wildness made load-bearing, power that protects what rides on it.

Read against the third degree of Virgo it suggests the sign's genius for making capacity useful, the body of instinct fitted with a structure that shelters others, and the elephant's proverbial memory and patience sit comfortably in Mercury's earth sign. Against the guardian imagery the 1925 set gives this degree, Charubel's beast reads as guardianship embodied rather than attending. Degree symbolism is an old craft.

Vettius Valens gave each sign three ten degree planetary faces in the second century, Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos preserved the unequal Egyptian bounds, and the first complete surviving picture set is Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum of 1494; the 1898 catalogue brought the whole form to English readers. This degree keeps the Sun's face with Mercury's term, dignity carrying intellect, the castle on the elephant again. Where natal or progressed points fall here, the image is read as tone: strength that has accepted its cargo.