A Man Standing at the Junction of Cross Roads, Not Knowing

It falls in the first decan of Aquarius (degrees 1 to 10), and is Aquarius's first degree. Its decan is ruled by Venus rather than Saturn, which colors the degree with something Aquarius 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. Aquarius is fixed air, a stubborn commitment to an idea or a group rather than to a single feeling. One further source stands apart from the Jones and Rudhyar material entirely.

Charubel's 1898 degree symbols, compiled well before Balboa Park, give this degree a man standing at the junction of cross roads, not knowing which way to go. This degree belongs to the symbol set assembled by Marc Edmund Jones after a 1925 sitting with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, where all 360 degrees were drawn blind from a shuffled deck of cards. Jones's own book followed in 1953, but the interpretation most people encounter today was written afterward, by Dane Rudhyar in his 1973 An Astrological Mandala, and Rudhyar's exact phrasing is withheld here because it remains his estate's copyrighted property. The value of a degree like this is less in prediction than in placement, a way of locating a moment precisely inside Aquarius's broader arc.