Taurus 5

This degree also carries an image from a different and earlier tradition. Charubel, writing in 1898, described a boat on a large lake, it might be a big river; two men are rowing in it. Counting from Taurus's start, this is the fifth degree, placing it in the sign's first decan. 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 original session behind this degree took place in 1925, when Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler drew all 360 cards blind, in Balboa Park, San Diego, one degree at a time. Jones printed his results in 1953. The phrasing that most sites and books repeat, though, comes from Dane Rudhyar's 1973 rewrite, An Astrological Mandala, which remains under copyright and is not reproduced here.

Taurus follows Aries by slowing the pace down into something that can be held, built and kept. The point of tracking a degree this closely is not to predict an event but to place it exactly within Taurus's span. Element and quality carry through every degree of Taurus: it is a fixed earth sign, and this degree inherits that basic temperament even as the decan and term add their own note.

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 catalogue 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 through Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement. Charubel's book was a late arrival in a much older project of subdividing the degrees.

Vettius Valens, writing in Greek around 175, split each sign into three planetary faces, leaving Venus, Taurus's own planet, to rule 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 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. 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.