Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Sabian Symbols

Aquarius 23

Zodiac Degree

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The wording of the Sabian symbol for this degree is not reproduced here. The phrasing in general circulation is Dane Rudhyar's, from An Astrological Mandala (1973), and stays in copyright until 2069. The atlas has withheld its own reading of the degree along with it, because that reading followed the copyrighted image closely enough to stand in for it. What remains is the degree itself, its sign, its decan and its term, which are facts about the zodiac and belong to nobody.

Facts
Correspondences
Decan Ruler
Moon 3
Chaldean/Hellenistic decan-face order.
Term Ruler
Mars (Aquarius 21-25) 1
Structure
Decan
Third Decan of Aquarius 2
The 21 to 30 degree arc of Aquarius.
Reading Keys
Term
Mars's term (roughly the 21st-25th degree of Aquarius) 1
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Three Men in a Boat, Two on One Side, One on the Other

This degree also carries an image from a different and earlier tradition. Charubel, writing in 1898, described three men in a boat, two on one side, one on the other. Counting from Aquarius's start, this is the twenty third 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. Behind every one of these 360 degrees sits the same 1925 event: Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, drawing blank cards in random order and setting down what she saw. Jones's book came out in 1953.

What is usually quoted today, however, is Dane Rudhyar's later reworking, published in 1973 as An Astrological Mandala, a copyrighted text this page does not reproduce. As the sign that closes the social season, Aquarius fixes its attention on the collective and on what should be true for everyone. The point of tracking a degree this closely is not to predict an event but to place it exactly within Aquarius's span. Element and quality carry through every degree of Aquarius: it is a fixed air sign, and this degree inherits that basic temperament even as the decan and term add their own note.

Aquarius 23: Three Men in a Boat

Charubel's image for this degree is a small, unevenly divided crew: three men in a boat, two on one side, one on the other. The number and its arrangement are the whole content of the picture, since nothing is said about their destination, their cargo or their mood, only the seating, and a boat balanced two against one is a boat carrying, quite literally, a majority and a minority in the same small hull. Three is the smallest number capable of producing a majority at all, and the image places that arithmetic bodily, weight distributed unevenly across a vessel that will list, however slightly, toward the heavier side unless the single man on the lighter side compensates by his own positioning.

Read at the twenty third degree of Aquarius, a sign given to thinking in groups, collectives and votes, the picture is a plain diagram of what a group actually is at its smallest workable scale, an uneven boat that still has to be rowed somewhere by everyone in it regardless of how the seats fell. The lone man on the one side is not necessarily outvoted in any final sense, since a small boat depends on cooperative rowing more than on majority sentiment, and the two who share a side must still row in time with a man they may outnumber but cannot do without. The shadow readings are the two who ignore the one entirely, and the one who refuses to row simply because he is outnumbered. On a natal Uranus or Moon this degree tends to mark small, consequential group dynamics, and its counsel is a boatman's: row together, or the boat goes nowhere, regardless of how the seats were assigned.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Contained In

Aquarius, Zodiac Signs
Source A History of Western AstrologyNicholas Campion
Sources
1. Tetrabiblos
Claudius Ptolemy, W. Foulsham, 1900View the Source
2. Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune
Chris Brennan, Amor Fati Publications, 2017View the Source
3. Anthology (Anthologiarum Libri Novem)
Vettius Valens, B.G. Teubner, 175View the Source
The Degrees of the Zodiac Symbolised
Charubel (John Thomas), 1826-1908, Nichols and Co., London, 1898the degree image for this degree, from the 1898 seriesView the Source
A History of Western Astrology
Nicholas Campion, Continuum, 2009View the Source
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