Aquarius 9

The image tradition for this degree goes back to 1925, to a session Marc Edmund Jones held with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, drawing all 360 cards blind and at random. Jones's book followed in 1953, though the phrasing most commonly cited now is Dane Rudhyar's, from his 1973 An Astrological Mandala, a text this page leaves unquoted because it is still under copyright.

Counting from Aquarius's start, this is the ninth degree, placing it in the sign's first decan. Its decan is ruled by Venus rather than Saturn, which colors the degree with something Aquarius does not supply on its own. The term ruler here is also Venus, so the finer division agrees with the decan rather than adding a separate voice. One further source stands apart from the Jones and Rudhyar material entirely. Charubel's 1898 degree symbols, compiled well before Balboa Park, give this degree a farmer's horse and cart with man driving. 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.

Charubel's image for this degree is unglamorous and entirely reliable: a farmer's horse and cart with man driving. Nothing here is fast, nothing is airborne, nothing anticipates the sign's later, more visionary degrees; this is transport at the pace of an actual working animal, loaded with an actual working cargo, moving toward an actual market or field. The farmer drives rather than merely rides, meaning he directs the horse continuously rather than trusting it to know the way, and that ongoing, hands-on direction is the quiet centre of the image.

Read at the ninth degree of Aquarius, a sign whose reputation runs toward the abstract and the futuristic, the picture insists that even its most forward looking ideas still have to travel by cart before they arrive anywhere, hauled at a horse's patient pace over ordinary roads by someone willing to hold the reins the whole way. There is nothing romantic added to the labour, and that is deliberate, since the degree values the unglamorous carrying trade precisely because visionary crops rot in the field if nobody builds the cart that gets them to market. The shadow readings are two: the farmer who never looks past the furrow to any wider destination, and the visionary who scorns the cart entirely and so never moves the harvest anywhere at all. On a natal Saturn or Mercury this degree tends to mark the steady logistical carriers of larger movements, the ones who get the idea to market, and its counsel is the driver's own: hold the reins the whole distance, and do not despise the horse for being slower than the destination deserves.