A Man with Arms Folded, Unmindful of Danger

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 third decan of Aquarius (degrees 21 to 30), and is Aquarius's twenty fourth degree. Its decan is ruled by Moon rather than Saturn, which colors the degree with something Aquarius does not supply on its own.

The narrower term division belongs to Mars, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. There is an independent image for this degree from 1898, decades before the Sabian set existed. Charubel's book puts it this way: a man with arms folded, unmindful of danger; behind him an assassin with dagger about to stab him. Aquarius is fixed air, a stubborn commitment to an idea or a group rather than to a single feeling. Read this way, the degree is less a fortune than a location: a specific point in Aquarius's arc, with its own decan and term layered on top.