The image
The image is a lesson in progress: a man teaching, and what he teaches is new ways of drawing or stating symbols that have come down from long ago. The symbols themselves are not named; they could be letters, emblems or images of a faith or a craft. What matters is the double movement, keeping the old meaning and changing its form.
Meaning
The tradition reads this image as a picture of living tradition. Symbols last only if each generation can read them, and that sometimes means redrawing them in a language of the present. Our keyword is Renewing tradition, and our keynote reads it in one line: inherited images stay alive only when someone recasts them for the present. In a chart the image could be read as a place where a person works with inherited material, a craft, a body of knowledge or a family story, and gives it a form others can use now. It is a teaching picture, and the teaching is about continuity through change.
Lynda Hill reads the degree before as the Karmic Condition and the degree after as the Quest Degree, and the pair around this one frame it neatly. Aries 9, before it, is the gaze into a crystal ball, images sought inwardly; Aries 11, after it, is the elected head of a country, a person given authority by many. So the private search for images becomes teaching, and teaching leads toward representing others. As a reading aid, Libra 10 lies opposite: a canoe worked carefully through rough water toward safety, a practical passage where this degree is an intellectual one.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Aries 9°00′ up to, but not including, Aries 10°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Aries 9°21′ reads Aries 10, and so does one at Aries 9°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Aries 11 after Aries 9°59′, or back into Aries 9 before Aries 9°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 10 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Aries 9, Aries 11 and Libra 10 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
- Aries 9 and Aries 11, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Libra 10, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Aries 9°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Aries 10; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Aries 9. 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: Inherited images stay alive only when someone recasts them for the present.
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
- Aries 9: Focused inner vision the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Aries 11: Representative authority the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Libra 10: Through to safety the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Aries in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
