Capricorn 6

Marc Edmund Jones assembled this degree, along with the other 359, from a 1925 sitting with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, drawing all the cards at random so nothing could be anticipated. His 1953 book set the images down for the first time. The interpretive language read today, however, belongs to Dane Rudhyar's 1973 An Astrological Mandala, still in copyright, and it is not quoted on this page. It falls in the first decan of Capricorn (degrees 1 to 10), and is Capricorn's sixth degree. 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. There is an independent image for this degree from 1898, decades before the Sabian set existed. Charubel's book puts it this way: a butcher clothed in his working dress conducting a sheep into the slaughter-house. Capricorn opens the earth triplicity's hardest test, initiating through structure, discipline, and long accountability. Read this way, the degree is less a fortune than a location: a specific point in Capricorn's arc, with its own decan and term layered on top.

Charubel's image for this degree refuses to be pleasant: a butcher clothed in his working dress conducting a sheep into the slaughter-house. Nothing in the wording softens it, and interpretation should not either. The butcher is not villainous; he is dressed for work, doing a licensed and ancient trade on which the town's tables depend, and the sheep goes with him, conducted rather than dragged. The scene is necessity wearing its apron.

Read against the sixth degree of Capricorn, the zodiac's sign of unsentimental function, the image states a truth most charts are arranged to avoid: some maintenance of life is paid for in life, some roles require doing plainly what others prefer done out of sight, and the person who accepts such a role carries the town's squeamishness along with its gratitude, usually receiving more of the first. There is a second reading inside the first, since every ending deliberately administered, the closed department, the finished treatment, the ended arrangement, has a butcher and a sheep in it, and the degree asks that the office be performed cleanly, quickly and without appetite. The shadow is twofold: cruelty, the work done with relish, and hypocrisy, the town that eats the meat and despises the man. On a natal Saturn or Mars this degree tends to mark those given the necessary hard offices, surgeons, closers, executors of every kind, and its counsel is exacting: if the task is truly necessary, do it with skill and without pleasure, and if you find the pleasure arriving, put down the trade.