A Shepherd on the Mountain Top with Crook in Hand, Looking

The wording that circulates for this cycle of 360 degree symbols traces to a 1925 session in Balboa Park, San Diego, where Marc Edmund Jones worked with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler, drawing 360 blank cards in random order while she described what came to her for each one. Jones published the results in 1953. The phrasing now most widely read is not his; it is Dane Rudhyar's, who reworked the material into his own interpretive language for An Astrological Mandala in 1973, and that 1973 text remains under copyright, so it is not reproduced here. It falls in the third decan of Capricorn (degrees 21 to 30), and is Capricorn's thirtieth degree. Its decan is ruled by Sun rather than Saturn, which colors the degree with something Capricorn 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 shepherd on the mountain top with crook in hand, looking out for the locality of his sheep. As a cardinal earth sign, Capricorn begins by setting a standard it then expects itself to meet. Read this way, the degree is less a fortune than a location: a specific point in Capricorn's arc, with its own decan and term layered on top.