A Very Small Cottage at the Base of a Very High Mountain, Where

A picture for this degree also survives from 1898, from Charubel's own independent series, published a generation before Jones's. He recorded a very small cottage at the base of a very high mountain, where jutting rocks appear to overhang the cottage perpetually threatening its destruction. Counting from Taurus's start, this is the seventeenth degree, placing it in the sign's second decan. Its decan is ruled by Mercury rather than Venus, which colors the degree with something Taurus does not supply on its own.

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. Taurus follows Aries by slowing the pace down into something that can be held, built and kept. The point of tracking a degree this closely is not to predict an event but to place it exactly within Taurus's span.