The image tradition for this degree goes back to 1925, to a session Marc Edmund Jones held with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, drawing all 360 cards blind and at random. Jones's book followed in 1953, though the phrasing most commonly cited now is Dane Rudhyar's, from his 1973 An Astrological Mandala, a text this page leaves unquoted because it is still under copyright. It falls in the first decan of Aries (degrees 1 to 10), and is Aries's ninth 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 Venus, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan.
A separate nineteenth century source gives this degree its own picture. Charubel's 1898 sequence, unconnected to the later Sabian material, records a straight road, going in a direct line up to a point from which lead a number of branch roads, parting in four different directions. There is a finger-post which points but one way--the primal way, the direct one, alluded to. As the first fire sign, Aries favors the direct move over the considered one, a readiness to act that has not yet learned patience. Taken together, the position, the decan, and the old image give this degree a specific character within Aries rather than a generic one.