The image
A woman has come up out of the waves and stands, or half lies, at the water's edge, still wet; a seal has followed her and wraps itself round her. Nothing else is given: no shore, no crowd, no reason for the embrace. The two creatures belong to different elements, the woman to the land she is just reaching and the seal to the sea she has just left, and the picture holds them together for a moment.
Meaning
The tradition reads the degree images as pictures, the way one reads a dream, and this one stands at the very start of the zodiac. Read that way it is a scene of arrival: something comes up out of a dark, undivided element into air and light, and the first thing that meets it is not a person but an animal, warm, clumsy and affectionate. Our keyword is Emergence; first consciousness, and our keynote says the same thing in one sentence: something new surfaces from the unconscious and is met by what is still half animal in us. One way to recognise the image in a chart is a placement where beginnings feel raw and bodily before they feel clear, and where the first welcome comes from instinct rather than from thought.
Lynda Hill reads every degree beside the degree before it, which she calls its Karmic Condition, and the degree after, her Quest Degree. Before Aries 1 stands Pisces 30, the last image of the circle: a great face cut into a mountain, an ideal hardened into stone. After it comes Aries 2, a comedian who keeps a crowd laughing. Read by her rule, the woman from the sea steps out of a finished, monumental form and on toward the first shared human pleasure. As a reading aid the degree opposite, Libra 1, can sit beside it: a dart pierces a butterfly and fixes it in a perfect, final form, where this degree keeps everything wet, alive and unfinished.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Aries 0°00′ up to, but not including, Aries 1°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Aries 0°48′ reads Aries 1, and so does one at Aries 0°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Aries 2 after Aries 0°59′, or back into Pisces 30 before Aries 0°00′. That is why the chart shows the minute beside the degree. In EsoTerrier's Sabian chart the Sun, the Moon and the Ascendant are read first, then the Midheaven and the planets; each placement in Aries 1 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Pisces 30, Aries 2 and Libra 1 beside it.
Correspondences
Each item with how it stands: “sourced” is in the work cited, “our construction” is EsoTerrier’s own, and “disputed” means the sources disagree.
- Where the image comes from
- Recorded by Marc Edmund Jones in Balboa Park, San Diego, in 1925, as the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler described the picture she saw for an unseen card; one of 360 done in a single day; published by Jones in 1953 sourced
- Degree before and after
- Pisces 30 and Aries 2, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Libra 1, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Aries 0°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Aries 1; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Pisces 30. A computed chart practically never lands on it disputed
How the schools read it
- Marc Edmund Jones (1953)
- Gives the degree a symbol line, a commentary, a one-word keyword and a positive and a negative reading. We quote none of it.
- Dane Rudhyar (1973)
- Rewords the image and adds a keynote and a commentary of his own, numbering the degrees as Jones did. In copyright to 2068; not used, and the place he gives the degree in his own structure is not shown.
- Lynda Hill (1995, 2004)
- Uses the symbols as an oracle, with her own commentary, and reads each degree beside the one before and the one after. Her rule and her two names are cited here; her text is not used.
- The Sabian Assembly
- Jones's own study group serves the 1953 image and keyword of a degree in its oracle, without commentary, on purpose.
- EsoTerrier
- Our keynote: Something new surfaces from the unconscious and is met by what is still half animal in us.
Claims about it
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The image line on this page, or on any site, is Elsie Wheeler's own wording.
falseWhat the record shows: Her words survive only as Jones's pencilled notes of 1925. Jones reworded them in 1931 and 1953, Rudhyar in 1936 and 1973, and Hill in her books.
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Reading the degree before and the degree after is part of how the zodiac is built, or of Jones's method.
falseWhat the record shows: It is Lynda Hill's practice, and the two names are hers. We show the two degrees with her name.
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Dane Rudhyar's 1973 lines are the Sabian symbols and free to print.
falseWhat the record shows: They are his rewording, with his own keynotes and commentary, renewed in 2002 and in US copyright to the end of 2068. None of them is used here.
Elsewhere on EsoTerrier
- Pisces 30: Shaped by an ideal the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Aries 2: Shared laughter the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Libra 1: Perfection by sacrifice the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Aries in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
