Gemini 2

Charubel, the pen name of the Welsh astrologer John Thomas, catalogued an image for every degree in 1898. His entry for this one describes a narrow vista of considerable extent, resembling a square tube, the interior of which is luminous, rendered so by some means I do not understand. It falls in the first decan of Gemini (degrees 1 to 10), and is Gemini's second degree. Its decan is ruled by Jupiter rather than Mercury, which colors the degree with something Gemini 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. Gemini is the zodiac's first air sign, occupied with contact, exchange, and the quick traffic of information between people. What a degree reading offers here is orientation rather than forecast, a way of naming exactly where in Gemini's cycle a person or moment sits.

The picture already quoted here is John Thomas's, the Welsh nonconformist minister, 1826 to 1908, who wrote as Charubel after turning to astrology and clairvoyance. His 1898 book gave nearly every degree its own image, well before the 1925 Balboa Park session between Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler that produced the material now generally read today through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement. Charubel's project was a late entry in a much older habit.

Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around 175, split each sign into three planetary faces, which is why Jupiter rather than Mercury, Gemini's own planet, still rules this degree's decan, and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately keeps this degree under Mercury's term, the finer division returning to the sign's own ruler even where the decan does not. Neither Valens nor Ptolemy attached a picture to any of it. The first complete pictorial set for all 360 degrees survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Latin Astrolabium Planum, safely public domain but not translatable into English without the translation acquiring its own separate rights. In practice, a degree defined this precisely is mostly used to time events through progressions or to flag charts sharing the same close point in synastry.