A Fork, Resembling a Farmyard Implement, with Four Prongs

Like the other 359 degrees in this set, this one goes back to 1925 and a session in Balboa Park, San Diego, where Marc Edmund Jones drew blank cards at random while the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler described what she perceived. Jones's book reached print in 1953. The phrasing most people know, though, is Dane Rudhyar's 1973 version, An Astrological Mandala, still protected by copyright and not reproduced on this page. It falls in the second decan of Taurus (degrees 11 to 20), and is Taurus's twelfth degree. Its decan is ruled by Mercury rather than Venus, which colors the degree with something Taurus does not supply on its own. The term ruler here is also Mercury, so the finer division agrees with the decan rather than adding a separate voice. Before Jones and Wheeler ever met, the Welsh astrologer Charubel had already published a complete set of 360 degree images in 1898.

For this degree, his book pictures a fork, resembling a farmyard implement, with four prongs. As a fixed earth sign, Taurus values what endures over what merely begins, and prizes steadiness above speed. Read this way, the degree is less a fortune than a location: a specific point in Taurus's arc, with its own decan and term layered on top.