♉ Taurus · 20 to 30 degrees
The third decan of Taurus
Taurus under Saturn: security taken seriously enough to become a discipline.
At a glance
| Degrees | 20 to 30 degrees of Taurus |
|---|---|
| Face ruler (Chaldean) | Saturn |
| Decanate ruler (modern) | Capricorn (ruler: Saturn) |
| Golden Dawn card | Seven of Pentacles |
| Element and modality | earth, fixed |
Saturn in the last face of Taurus is the tradition at its most sober about the earth signs. Patience, endurance, and the long accumulation of something durable.
Associated with real staying power and with the difficulty of enjoying what has been built while still building it.
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 Saturn. The modern decanate system gives each decan to one of the three signs of its own element, here Capricorn.
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 Saturn 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 Pentacles, which is why that card carries Saturn and Taurus 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 Pentacles 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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