Virgo 4

It falls in the first decan of Virgo (degrees 1 to 10), and is Virgo's fourth degree. Its decan is ruled by Sun rather than Mercury, which colors the degree with something Virgo does not supply on its own. The narrower term division belongs to Mercury, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. Virgo is mutable earth, occupied with the fine adjustment of material that fixed Taurus would rather leave alone. 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 square patch of ground, resembling what might be set apart for lawn tennis; covered with red cloth, or what resembles such. This is one of the 360 degree images that Marc Edmund Jones obtained in 1925 by drawing blank cards, shuffled at random, while the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler described her impressions in Balboa Park, San Diego. Jones's own account followed in 1953, but the version generally read today is Dane Rudhyar's, published in 1973 as An Astrological Mandala; that later text is under copyright until 2069 and is withheld from this page rather than quoted. None of this is meant as prophecy; it is a way of describing where, precisely, this degree sits inside Virgo's larger pattern.

Charubel's image for this degree is a puzzle worth unpacking slowly: a square patch of ground about the size set apart for lawn tennis, covered with red cloth, or what resembles it. Three features carry the meaning. The ground is squared, measured out for a game with rules, a bounded field of play rather than open country. It is covered, its actual grass or earth hidden under a laid surface. And the covering is red, the least neutral of colours, laid where white lines and green lawn are expected.

Read against the fourth degree of Virgo the picture suggests order imposed on nature so thoroughly that the natural ground no longer shows, the sign's love of preparation carried to the point where the field itself is upholstered, and the red hints at what the tidy surface conceals, vitality, appetite or anger dressed as decorum. A court is for contest conducted politely; scarlet underfoot says the contest is not as bloodless as the rules imply. The degree reads as passion formalised, feeling given a regulation playing area, which is workable as long as everyone remembers what the cloth is covering. The shadow is exactly that forgetting, procedure mistaken for the whole game. On a natal Mercury or Venus this degree tends to mark those who manage strong feeling through structure, rules, schedules and courts of every kind, and its counsel is to lift the corner of the cloth occasionally and greet the actual ground.