A Beacon Light on a High Rock

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 second decan of Aquarius (degrees 11 to 20), and is Aquarius's fifteenth 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 Jupiter, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. This degree also carries an image from a different and earlier tradition. Charubel, writing in 1898, described a beacon light on a high rock. As the sign that closes the social season, Aquarius fixes its attention on the collective and on what should be true for everyone. Taken together, the position, the decan, and the old image give this degree a specific character within Aquarius rather than a generic one.