Aries 19

It falls in the second decan of Aries (degrees 11 to 20), and is Aries's nineteenth degree. 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. As the first fire sign, Aries favors the direct move over the considered one, a readiness to act that has not yet learned patience. This degree also carries an image from a different and earlier tradition. Charubel, writing in 1898, described a country site at the foot of a mountain, with many small dwellings thereon. There are coal-pits in the locality.

A poor woman is nursing a baby; she is weeping, having just been made a widow. This is one of the 360 degree images that Marc Edmund Jones obtained in 1925 by drawing blank cards, shuffled at random, while the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler described her impressions in Balboa Park, San Diego. Jones's own account followed in 1953, but the version generally read today is Dane Rudhyar's, published in 1973 as An Astrological Mandala; that later text is under copyright until 2069 and is withheld from this page rather than quoted. The value of a degree like this is less in prediction than in placement, a way of locating a moment precisely inside Aries's broader arc.

Individual degree meanings are a later addition to a much older, planet only system. Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around the year 175, divided each sign into three ten degree faces under a rotating planetary sequence, the scheme behind the Sun's rule over this degree's decan, the second of Aries, and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately records a table of unequal bounds among five planets, the source of the Mercury term recorded here. Neither writer pictured a degree, only ruled it. A complete set of individual degree pictures first survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum, a Latin work safely public domain, though its old English translations are not.

The next complete English set is Welsh minister John Thomas's, writing as Charubel, whose 1898 book gives this degree a settlement at the foot of a mountain, with coal pits nearby and a poor woman weeping over her newly widowed state as she nurses a baby, a starker picture of hardship than most of his entries. Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler produced an independent image for this same degree in 1925, now generally read through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement. In practice, this degree is mostly used to time events through a progressed Sun, Moon or angle reaching it exactly, or to flag two charts sharing it closely enough to matter in synastry, both modern uses over a considerably older technical base.