A Ship in Mid-Ocean

A separate nineteenth century source gives this degree its own picture. Charubel's 1898 sequence, unconnected to the later Sabian material, records a ship in mid-ocean; a boundless expanse of water. It is a merchant ship. It falls in the second decan of Aries (degrees 11 to 20), and is Aries's seventeenth 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.

The degree symbols themselves date to 1925, when Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler sat in Balboa Park, San Diego, and drew all 360 blank cards in random sequence so that no degree's image could be planned in advance. Jones published his findings in 1953, yet the reading in general circulation since is Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement, not Jones's own words, and Rudhyar's text is still in copyright and is not quoted on this page. As the first fire sign, Aries favors the direct move over the considered one, a readiness to act that has not yet learned patience. The point of tracking a degree this closely is not to predict an event but to place it exactly within Aries's span.