Aries 14

Charubel, the pen name of the Welsh astrologer John Thomas, catalogued an image for every degree in 1898. His entry for this one describes a Sun rising in the south-east quarter of the heavens, a little further south than that point which the Sun occupies at the winter solstice. Counting from Aries's start, this is the fourteenth degree, placing it in the sign's second decan. 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. Every degree in this set, including this one, comes from a single 1925 sitting: Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler, in Balboa Park, San Diego, drawing 360 blank cards in random order. Jones's book appeared in 1953, but it is Dane Rudhyar's 1973 reinterpretation, An Astrological Mandala, that is generally quoted today, and its copyrighted wording is withheld from 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. What a degree reading offers here is orientation rather than forecast, a way of naming exactly where in Aries's cycle a person or moment sits.

The picture already quoted for this degree is John Thomas's, the Welsh nonconformist minister, 1826 to 1908, who became an astrologer and clairvoyant under the pen name Charubel. His 1898 catalogue gave an image to nearly every one of the 360 degrees, published well before the 1925 Balboa Park session between Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler that produced the material generally read today through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement. Charubel's book was a late arrival in a considerably older project of dividing the degrees.

Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around the year 175, split each sign into three ten degree faces under a rotating planetary sequence, leaving the Sun to rule this degree's decan rather than Mars, Aries's own planet, and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately lists unequal bounds among five planets, giving this degree to Mercury's term, a table built entirely of rulers with no accompanying image. The first complete pictorial set for all 360 degrees at once survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Latin Astrolabium Planum, safely public domain but not translatable into English without the translation acquiring its own separate rights. Charubel achieved independently, in English, what Angelus had done in Latin nearly four centuries earlier. In practice, a degree defined this precisely is mostly used to time events through progressions or to flag charts sharing the same close point in synastry.