Capricorn 2

An older, independent picture-set for the degrees exists too: John Thomas, the Welsh astrologer who wrote as Charubel, published his own image for every degree in 1898, decades before the Balboa Park session. For this degree his catalogue describes a lofty building, with nave and massive pillars on each hand. Counting from Capricorn's start, this is the second degree, placing it in the sign's first decan. Its decan is ruled by Jupiter rather than Saturn, which colors the degree with something Capricorn 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. 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. Capricorn opens the earth triplicity's hardest test, initiating through structure, discipline, and long accountability. What a degree reading offers here is orientation rather than forecast, a way of naming exactly where in Capricorn's cycle a person or moment sits.

Charubel's image for this degree is architecture without people: a lofty building, with nave and massive pillars on each hand. The word nave places it, since a nave is the long central walkway of a church, the part built for the congregation rather than the clergy, and the pillars stand to either side the way they do when a visitor is walking down the middle looking up. The image is therefore a point of view as much as a structure, the experience of moving through something far larger, older and heavier than oneself, held up by supports one did not raise.

Read against the second degree of Capricorn the picture states the sign's deepest respect, which is for structure that outlasts its builders, and adds the correction the sign periodically needs, that the massive pillars exist for the sake of the open walkway between them, not the other way round. Institutions, in other words, are for passage; the stone serves the procession. The shadow readings are two. One is the visitor dwarfed into passivity, a life spent admiring an aisle it never walks to the end of. The other belongs to the builders, weight added for magnificence until the building is all pillar and no path. On a natal Saturn or Midheaven this degree tends to mark people drawn to great structures, churches, firms, laws and disciplines, and its counsel keeps the proportions straight: honour what bears the load, and keep walking down the middle of it toward whatever the far end holds.