Virgo 5

Nothing of the picture for this degree is set down here, and the reason is a rights one rather than an editorial one. The images were produced in a single 1925 session in Balboa Park, San Diego, where the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler described a scene for each of 360 blank cards that Marc Edmund Jones handed her in random order. Jones published his own record of the set in 1953. What almost everyone quotes today is Dane Rudhyar's restatement of it in An Astrological Mandala in 1973, a text still under copyright, so neither the scene given for this degree nor its keynote appears in this article.

The position itself is unowned, and it carries real structure. This is the fifth degree of Virgo, inside the first decan, the one to ten arc, which answers to the Sun. The Egyptian term covering the first through the seventh degree belongs to Mercury, which also rules Virgo, so at this point the sign's ruler holds the finer division while a different body holds the wider one. A solar decan under a mercurial term is a combination worth sitting with: light thrown on something, and a faculty for sorting what the light shows.

Virgo is mutable earth, the sign of the practical adjustment rather than the grand gesture, and its habit is to check a thing before accepting it. A degree this early in the sign has the whole of that work still ahead of it. Used technically, the point serves in progressions, in directions and in synastry, independently of which century's wording one reads for the image.

The structural facts of this degree, its solar decan and Mercury term, are already set out in the companion article, which frees this one for the older picture. Charubel, the pen name of Welsh astrologer John Thomas, published an image for every degree of the zodiac in 1898, and for Virgo 5 he described a very long, straight road whose terminus he could not see. The confession is part of the symbol; the seer reports the limit of his own sight. A straight road is the engineered path, direction settled once and then simply walked, and its unseen end makes the picture a study in method versus destination.

Read against the fifth degree of Virgo it suggests the sign's deepest wager, that fidelity to the process, step after correct step, is rational even when the outcome stays over the horizon. There is comfort and severity in it at once: no landmarks, no turnings, but also no ambiguity about the way. The catalogue this comes from renewed an old form. The second century faces of Vettius Valens and the unequal bounds preserved in Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos gave degrees rulers without pictures, and the first complete picture set survives in Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum of 1494, four hundred years before the Welsh book and its companion translation of La Volasfera. Astrologers who read degree symbols where a natal Sun, Moon, angle or progression falls treat this one as a temperament of persistence, the long obedience, walking a road whose end is trusted rather than seen.