A Comet with a Very Long Tail, Pointing Towards the Earth

A picture for this degree also survives from 1898, from Charubel's own independent series, published a generation before Jones's. He recorded a comet with a very long tail, pointing towards the earth. It falls in the third decan of Aries (degrees 21 to 30), and is Aries's twenty third degree. Its decan is ruled by Venus rather than Mars, which colors the degree with something Aries 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. Behind every one of these 360 degrees sits the same 1925 event: Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, drawing blank cards in random order and setting down what she saw. Jones's book came out in 1953.

What is usually quoted today, however, is Dane Rudhyar's later reworking, published in 1973 as An Astrological Mandala, a copyrighted text this page does not reproduce. Aries opens the zodiac with unmediated initiative, action taken before it has been talked over or shaped by circumstance. The point of tracking a degree this closely is not to predict an event but to place it exactly within Aries's span. Element and quality carry through every degree of Aries: it is a cardinal fire sign, and this degree inherits that basic temperament even as the decan and term add their own note.