Aquarius 21

Marc Edmund Jones assembled this degree, along with the other 359, from a 1925 sitting with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, drawing all the cards at random so nothing could be anticipated. His 1953 book set the images down for the first time. The interpretive language read today, however, belongs to Dane Rudhyar's 1973 An Astrological Mandala, still in copyright, and it is not quoted on this page.

Counting from Aquarius's start, this is the twenty first degree, placing it in the sign's third decan. 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 Mars, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan.

A separate nineteenth century source gives this degree its own picture. Charubel's 1898 sequence, unconnected to the later Sabian material, records a man in monkish dress, with long hair and flowing beard. Aquarius is fixed air, a stubborn commitment to an idea or a group rather than to a single feeling. Taken together, the position, the decan, and the old image give this degree a specific character within Aquarius rather than a generic one.

Charubel's image for this degree is a figure defined by withdrawal: a man in monkish dress, with long hair and flowing beard. Every visible detail points the same direction. The dress is monkish, marking a life set apart by vow or custom rather than by circumstance; the hair is long and the beard flowing, both signs of years spent without the ordinary grooming demanded by life among worldly company, and together they describe not a man temporarily unkempt but a man who has deliberately stopped attending to appearances that mattered only inside the society he has left.

Read at the twenty first degree of Aquarius the picture examines a genuine strand within the sign, the hermit or renunciate wing of a temperament more often associated with reform of the crowd than with departure from it entirely, and it credits that strand with real integrity, since long hair and an unshorn beard worn this way are not neglect but evidence, worn plainly on the body, of years actually spent apart in whatever discipline the monkish dress signifies. The image asks what such long removal has purchased, since Aquarius rarely values withdrawal for its own sake and generally wants to know what the hermit intends to bring back, wisdom, perspective, a corrected sense of what matters, when and if he returns to company. The shadow readings are withdrawal that has curdled into simple avoidance of other people, and its opposite, a beard grown for show rather than earned by any real interior discipline. On a natal Saturn, Neptune or twelfth-house emphasis this degree tends to mark genuine ascetics and long solitary seekers, and its counsel is plain: let the years apart be real work, not merely absence.