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 Aquarius (degrees 11 to 20), and is Aquarius's twelfth degree. Its decan is ruled by Mercury rather than Saturn, which colors the degree with something Aquarius 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. An older, independent picture-set for the degrees exists too: John Thomas, the Welsh astrologer who wrote as Charubel, published his own image for every degree in 1898, decades before the Balboa Park session.
For this degree his catalogue describes a sexton digging a grave. 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.