A Battle-Field Where Two Contending Armies Are Engaged

In 1925, working with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, Marc Edmund Jones drew all 360 of these degree cards blind and recorded her impressions on the spot. His book appeared in 1953. What most readers now quote, however, is Dane Rudhyar's 1973 reinterpretation from An Astrological Mandala, a text still protected by copyright and therefore not reproduced on this page. It falls in the second decan of Aries (degrees 11 to 20), and is Aries's eighteenth degree. Its decan is ruled by Sun rather than Mars, which colors the degree with something Aries does not supply on its own. The narrower term division belongs to Mercury, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. 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 battle-field where two contending armies are engaged in deadly conflict. Aries opens the zodiac with unmediated initiative, action taken before it has been talked over or shaped by circumstance. Read this way, the degree is less a fortune than a location: a specific point in Aries's arc, with its own decan and term layered on top.