Taurus 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 large figure 2 comes before my vision. It falls in the first decan of Taurus (degrees 1 to 10), and is Taurus's second degree. Its decan is ruled by Venus, Taurus's own planet, reinforcing rather than complicating the sign's usual character. The term ruler here is also Venus, so the finer division agrees with the decan rather than adding a separate voice.

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. As a fixed earth sign, Taurus values what endures over what merely begins, and prizes steadiness above speed. What a degree reading offers here is orientation rather than forecast, a way of naming exactly where in Taurus'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 ahead of 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. 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 Venus, Taurus's own planet, still rules this degree's decan, and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos separately lists unequal bounds among five planets, giving this degree to Venus's term as well, the two ancient systems agreeing here. 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. Charubel achieved independently, in English, what Angelus had done in Latin nearly four centuries earlier. 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.