The image
The picture is a clown at work, and the work is the face: eyebrows up, mouth stretched, one expression tumbling into the next. The line names no circus, no audience and no costume, so everything is in the features themselves. A clown's faces are larger than life on purpose, so that they can be read from the back of a tent; surprise, sorrow and delight are each pushed past what anyone would show in the street.
Meaning
The Sabian tradition reads its images as symbols, and a clown is a figure that has meant several things at once for a long time. Our keyword is The comic mask, and our keynote says that exaggerated expressions show feelings that a straight face hides. The point is not that the clown is false. He shows feelings openly, only larger, and the size makes them safe to laugh at. One way to read a placement in this degree is as an ease with expression, a readiness to make visible what others keep behind a polite face, and sometimes the habit of turning a real feeling into a performance so that nobody has to take it too seriously, the performer included.
In Lynda Hill's terms the clown has a background in the degree before and a heading in the degree after. Behind this one lies Cancer 10, a big diamond whose cutting is not finished, worth that cannot yet be seen; ahead lies Cancer 12, a Chinese woman feeding an infant at the breast, the child bringing a message. By her rule the hidden worth of the rough stone finds a loud outer form in the clown's face, and the next degree turns to the quietest kind of care, where a message is carried without any show at all. As a reading aid, the opposite degree, Capricorn 11, shows many pheasants together, a crowd of bright birds kept safe in numbers, beside this single performer who stands out on purpose.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Cancer 10°00′ up to, but not including, Cancer 11°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Cancer 10°28′ reads Cancer 11, and so does one at Cancer 10°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Cancer 12 after Cancer 10°59′, or back into Cancer 10 before Cancer 10°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 Cancer 11 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Cancer 10, Cancer 12 and Capricorn 11 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
- Cancer 10 and Cancer 12, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Capricorn 11, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Cancer 10°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Cancer 11; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Cancer 10. 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: Exaggerated expressions show feelings that a straight face hides.
Claims about it
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
- Cancer 10: Rough value the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Cancer 12: Carrying a message the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Capricorn 11: Protected abundance the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Cancer in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
