A Man in a Very Dark Room, Sitting at a Table, with Books

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 man in a very dark room, sitting at a table, with books, papers, and mathematical instruments distributed about him promiscuously. It falls in the first decan of Aries (degrees 1 to 10), and is Aries's second degree. Its decan is ruled by Mars, Aries's own planet, reinforcing rather than complicating the sign's usual character.

The narrower term division belongs to Jupiter, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. The degree symbols themselves date to 1925, when Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler sat in Balboa Park, San Diego, and drew all 360 blank cards in random sequence so that no degree's image could be planned in advance. Jones published his findings in 1953, yet the reading in general circulation since is Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement, not Jones's own words, and Rudhyar's text is still in copyright and is not quoted on this page. Aries opens the zodiac with unmediated initiative, action taken before it has been talked over or shaped by circumstance. What a degree reading offers here is orientation rather than forecast, a way of naming exactly where in Aries's cycle a person or moment sits.