Gemini 18

In 1925, working with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler in Balboa Park, San Diego, Marc Edmund Jones drew all 360 of these degree cards blind and recorded her impressions on the spot. His book appeared in 1953. What most readers now quote, however, is Dane Rudhyar's 1973 reinterpretation from An Astrological Mandala, a text still protected by copyright and therefore not reproduced on this page. It falls in the second decan of Gemini (degrees 11 to 20), and is Gemini's eighteenth degree. Its decan is ruled by Mars rather than Mercury, which colors the degree with something Gemini does not supply on its own.

The term ruler here is also Mars, so the finer division agrees with the decan rather than adding a separate voice. Charubel's 1898 entry for this degree is not a scene at all but a number, which he records as governing it rather than any picture. As a mutable air sign, Gemini adapts by multiplying its options rather than committing early to one. Read this way, the degree is less a fortune than a location: a specific point in Gemini's arc, with its own decan and term layered on top. Element and quality carry through every degree of Gemini: it is a mutable air sign, and this degree inherits that basic temperament even as the decan and term add their own note.

A separate, older picture survives for this degree too. Charubel, the pen name of the Welsh minister and astrologer John Thomas, gave nearly every one of the 360 degrees an image in 1898, decades before the 1925 Balboa Park session between Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler that produced the material now generally read through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement.

For this degree Charubel gave a short, numerical entry, the number six rules this degree, one of several places in his book where a number stands in for a scene. That entry sits alongside two older technical facts already carried by this degree. Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around the year 175, divided each sign into three planetary faces, leaving Mars to rule this degree's decan, the second of Gemini, and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately moves this degree into Mars's own bound as well, the two ancient divisions agreeing here. Neither writer pictured anything, only assigned a ruling planet. 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 never freely translated into English. Practically, a degree defined this closely is mostly used to time events through progressions or synastry.