♈ Aries · 20 to 30 degrees
The third decan of Aries
Aries under Venus: the drive turned towards people, pleasure and what is worth having.
At a glance
| Degrees | 20 to 30 degrees of Aries |
|---|---|
| Face ruler (Chaldean) | Venus |
| Decanate ruler (modern) | Sagittarius (ruler: Jupiter) |
| Golden Dawn card | Four of Wands |
| Element and modality | fire, cardinal |
Venus in the last face of Mars own sign is a genuine mixture, and the tradition treats it as one: appetite rather than aggression, and energy pointed at attraction and enjoyment.
Associated with charm on top of force, and with the specific difficulty of wanting something and somebody at the same intensity.
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 Venus. The modern decanate system gives each decan to one of the three signs of its own element, here Sagittarius.
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 Venus means →The tarot connection
The Golden Dawn mapped the 36 decans onto the 36 minor arcana pips, two through ten. This decan is the Four of Wands, which is why that card carries Venus and Aries 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.
Four of Wands 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.
Calculate my birth chart