♏ Scorpio · 20 to 30 degrees
The third decan of Scorpio
Scorpio with Venus: desire at depth, and attachment that is rarely casual.
At a glance
| Degrees | 20 to 30 degrees of Scorpio |
|---|---|
| Face ruler (Chaldean) | Venus |
| Decanate ruler (modern) | Cancer (ruler: the Moon) |
| Golden Dawn card | Seven of Cups |
| Element and modality | water, fixed |
Venus in the last face of Scorpio is read as attraction with a hook in it: strong, private, and slow to be given.
Associated with the several attractive options that cannot all be real, which is what the corresponding Seven of Cups is about.
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 Cancer.
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 Seven of Cups, which is why that card carries Venus and Scorpio 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.
Seven of Cups 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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