Aries 2

Before Jones and Wheeler ever met, the Welsh astrologer Charubel had already published a complete set of 360 degree images in 1898. For this degree, his book pictures a man in a very dark room, sitting at a table, with books, papers, and mathematical instruments distributed about him promiscuously. It falls in the first decan of Aries (degrees 1 to 10), and is Aries's second degree. Its decan is ruled by Mars, Aries's own planet, reinforcing rather than complicating the sign's usual character.

The narrower term division belongs to Jupiter, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan. The degree symbols themselves date to 1925, when Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler sat in Balboa Park, San Diego, and drew all 360 blank cards in random sequence so that no degree's image could be planned in advance. Jones published his findings in 1953, yet the reading in general circulation since is Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement, not Jones's own words, and Rudhyar's text is still in copyright and is not quoted on this page. Aries opens the zodiac with unmediated initiative, action taken before it has been talked over or shaped by circumstance. 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 image quoted for this degree belongs to John Thomas, 1826 to 1908, a Welsh nonconformist minister who turned to astrology and clairvoyance under the pen name Charubel. His book, The Degrees of the Zodiac Symbolised, appeared in 1898, giving all but three of the 360 degrees an image of their own, decades before Marc Edmund Jones and Elsie Wheeler produced the material now generally read through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 rewrite. Charubel's project was not the first attempt to individuate the degrees.

Long before either man, the Hellenistic astrologer Vettius Valens divided each sign into three ten degree faces, each carrying a planetary ruler in a fixed rotation, and Ptolemy recorded a separate table of unequal bounds, five planets sharing each sign in different proportions. Both survive as the decan and term facts attached to this degree, Mars for the decan and Jupiter for the term, neither of them requiring a picture at all, since Valens and Ptolemy were assigning rulers, not images. The jump to a genuinely pictorial degree, one for every single point of the ecliptic, first appears complete in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum, a Latin work now in the public domain.

Charubel's achievement was to do the same in English, independent of any of the older material, and independent again of the Sabian set that followed him by twenty seven years. Practically, a reading built on a degree this narrow is used to time a life event through secondary progressions, or to compare two charts sharing the exact same point, applications neither Valens nor Ptolemy would have recognized, since their systems worked in whole decans and bounds rather than single degrees read individually.