♒ Aquarius · 10 to 20 degrees
The second decan of Aquarius
Aquarius with Mercury: the intellect at its most detached and most inventive.
At a glance
| Degrees | 10 to 20 degrees of Aquarius |
|---|---|
| Face ruler (Chaldean) | Mercury |
| Decanate ruler (modern) | Gemini (ruler: Mercury) |
| Golden Dawn card | Six of Swords |
| Element and modality | air, fixed |
Mercury in the second face of Aquarius is read as original thinking that arrives sideways: systems, patterns and conclusions reached by a route nobody else took.
Associated with moving on while carrying what cannot be put down, which is the corresponding Six of Swords.
Two systems, two answers
There are two decan rulership systems in circulation and they give different rulers for the same ten degrees. The older face system runs the seven classical planets in Chaldean order around the whole zodiac, and gives this decan to Mercury. The modern decanate system gives each decan to one of the three signs of its own element, here Gemini.
Neither is presented here as the correct one. The tarot attributions follow the face system, most popular modern astrology follows the decanate system, and knowing which one a source is using explains most of the apparent contradictions you will find elsewhere.
What Mercury means →The tarot connection
The Golden Dawn mapped the 36 decans onto the 36 minor arcana pips, two through ten. This decan is the Six of Swords, which is why that card carries Mercury and Aquarius as its attributions in any Golden Dawn-derived deck.
The pips run by modality rather than in zodiacal order: the cardinal sign of each element takes two to four, the fixed sign five to seven, and the mutable sign eight to ten. It is the detail most often got wrong, including by us until a test caught it.
Six of Swords on Memento Arcana →Which decan are you?
Your decan is decided by the degree of your Sun, not by the date alone, and the chart gives you the degree of every planet as well.
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