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 Capricorn (degrees 21 to 30), and is Capricorn's twenty fourth 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 Saturn, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan.
Charubel, the pen name of the Welsh astrologer John Thomas, catalogued an image for every degree in 1898. His entry for this one describes a man struggling in a lake; only the head out; sometimes the head appears to sink under, but it rises again and again until at last a lifebuoy is thrown to him by a person witnessing his position; finally he is saved. Capricorn opens the earth triplicity's hardest test, initiating through structure, discipline, and long accountability. 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.