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.
Counting from Libra's start, this is the twenty seventh degree, placing it in the sign's third decan. Its decan is ruled by Jupiter rather than Venus, which colors the degree with something Libra does not supply on its own. The narrower term division belongs to Venus, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. A picture for this degree also survives from 1898, from Charubel's own independent series, published a generation before Jones's. He recorded a rhinoceros. As a cardinal air sign, Libra initiates through relationship, weighing one position against another before committing. Taken together, the position, the decan, and the old image give this degree a specific character within Libra rather than a generic one. Element and quality carry through every degree of Libra: it is a cardinal air sign, and this degree inherits that basic temperament even as the decan and term add their own note.