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 Scorpio (degrees 11 to 20), and is Scorpio's twelfth degree. Its decan is ruled by Sun rather than Mars, which colors the degree with something Scorpio 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. 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 bull pawing up the earth. As the middle water sign, Scorpio does not merely feel; it investigates, and it does not let go easily. Read this way, the degree is less a fortune than a location: a specific point in Scorpio's arc, with its own decan and term layered on top. Element and quality carry through every degree of Scorpio: it is a fixed water sign, and this degree inherits that basic temperament even as the decan and term add their own note.