Sign: Libra | Sign Ruler: Venus | Decan Ruler: Jupiter | Element: Air | Mode: Cardinal
Venus rules Libra by domicile and Jupiter rules this decan by face. Venus and Jupiter are the two benefics and traditionally cooperate well, combining sociability, generosity, pleasure, and abundance. The result is a face associated with enjoyment, companionship, celebration, and the pursuit of experience, though not always with moderation. Core Principle: Pleasure through experience.

Liber Hermetis
“The third decan of Libra has the face of Jupiter. Its name is Psamatoras. It causes nervous afflictions. It is in the appearance of a serpent.”

Picatrix-Ibn Ezra
“In the third face of Libra ascends a man riding upon an ass, and a wolf is before him. This is the face of evil works, sodomites, adultery, songs, rejoicing, and flavours. This is its form.”

As can often be the case, the last decan of the sign seems suggestive of a level of unravelling as if preparing for the next phase. This loosening, where the carefully maintained structure begins to relax is the realm of Libra III, where Jupiter enters Venus’s sign of pleasure and companionship to expand what was carefully contained, into something freer. When the two benefics cooperate without moderating influence, the atmosphere becomes festive, appetitive and mobile.

The ancient images depict a figure riding an ass, the wolf of appetite preceding him, determining the journey’s direction by the urgency of its own hunger. The ass, an animal of patient endurance, carries its rider through a rocky terrain, suggesting that this journey is perhaps morally ambiguous; a passage through the world’s pleasures led by an appetite that knows what it wants and is not particularly interested in the rider’s reservations. The serpent of the older tradition implies the body’s testimony to overstimulation; Jupiterian generosity with Venusian ease providing little resistance. This face does not describe virtue or vice, but the territory that opens up when discipline is released and appetite suddenly finds itself with a wolf out front and an open road.

The Golden Dawn assigns this decan to the Four of Swords, traditionally entitled Truce. As is often the case, the correspondence appears at odds with the ancient images although both witnesses suggest movement, appetite and participation rather than withdrawal or stillness. Jupiter operating within Venus’s sign favours concord, sociability and enjoyment, a space where life may once again be freely experienced.

We arrive here to witness release, when the structure built around absence has become sufficiently stable that we can afford to leave temporarily, to follow the wolf into the world’s pleasures of company and song without the whole careful edifice collapsing. This small freedom, is evidence sorrow has begun to integrate, has a form durable enough to exist without constant maintenance; we can ride out into the world’s abundance without carrying the full weight of loss in every step.

The shadow of this face is release becoming avoidance; festivity substituted for presence rather than expressing it, wandering used to distance rather than to encounter. Jupiter without measure is generous to excess, and the wolf that leads the rider can lead away from experience and into distraction just as easily. Songs, flavours, and rejoicing become genuinely available only to those who follow the wolf with awareness rather than surrendering the reins entirely. The serpent’s nervous afflictions record the body’s knowledge of the difference: between pleasure that integrates what grief has taught, and pleasure that attempts to dissolve it; it is a delicate balance. We can either return changed and nourished, or return depleted, the choice is ours to make.

The Wanderer teaches that movement is not abandonment, we carry our history wherever the road leads and our new new world becomes larger than grief. We discover how sorrow can travel alongside curiosity, pleasure, and companionship, for what we have loved always remains part of us, even as the landscape changes; our internal truce opens the road ahead.