The image
The picture is intimate and ordinary. A woman, Chinese in the image, holds a baby at the breast and feeds it. Then the line adds something no photograph could show: the child brings a message. What the message is, and for whom, the image does not say. It leaves the woman's daily care and the child's unknown errand side by side, the one plain and physical, the other hidden inside the small life she is feeding.
Meaning
As the tradition reads every degree, the image is a symbol, and here the symbol rests on a gap between what is seen and what is said. Our keyword is Carrying a message, and our keynote says that ordinary care holds a life that has something to bring. The mother does not need to know the message to feed the child. One way to read a placement in this degree is as a sense that something entrusted to one's care matters beyond the daily round, whether it is a child, a piece of work or an idea, and as the patience to look after it before its meaning is clear. The woman's culture is part of the picture, not a code: the image simply places this care in one particular home.
Lynda Hill reads the degrees on either side of a placement as its context, the one before as its background and the one after as its direction. The background here is Cancer 11, the clown making faces, feeling shown large; the direction is Cancer 13, a hand bent a little with its thumb standing out strongly. By her rule the loud, visible face gives way to a hidden message, and the message in turn gives way to a hand whose shape shows what a person is made of. The opposite degree, Capricorn 12, read beside it as an aid, is a naturalist giving a talk: knowledge spoken aloud to a room, set against the unspoken message a small child carries home.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Cancer 11°00′ up to, but not including, Cancer 12°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Cancer 11°05′ reads Cancer 12, and so does one at Cancer 11°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Cancer 13 after Cancer 11°59′, or back into Cancer 11 before Cancer 11°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 12 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Cancer 11, Cancer 13 and Capricorn 12 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 11 and Cancer 13, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Capricorn 12, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Cancer 11°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Cancer 12; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Cancer 11. 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: Ordinary care holds a life that has something to bring.
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
- Cancer 11: The comic mask the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Cancer 13: Character made visible the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Capricorn 12: Knowledge made visible the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Cancer in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
