A Man Reclining on a Rustic Seat 'Neath a Shady Tree

The wording that circulates for this cycle of 360 degree symbols traces to a 1925 session in Balboa Park, San Diego, where Marc Edmund Jones worked with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler, drawing 360 blank cards in random order while she described what came to her for each one. Jones published the results in 1953. The phrasing now most widely read is not his; it is Dane Rudhyar's, who reworked the material into his own interpretive language for An Astrological Mandala in 1973, and that 1973 text remains under copyright, so it is not reproduced here. It falls in the third decan of Aquarius (degrees 21 to 30), and is Aquarius's thirtieth degree. Its decan is ruled by Moon rather than Saturn, which colors the degree with something Aquarius does not supply on its own. The narrower term division belongs to Saturn, 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 man reclining on a rustic seat 'neath a shady tree; a ray of sunshine has fallen on him. As the sign that closes the social season, Aquarius fixes its attention on the collective and on what should be true for everyone. Read this way, the degree is less a fortune than a location: a specific point in Aquarius's arc, with its own decan and term layered on top.