The image
This is one of the images in the set that is more an idea than a view of something. There is a tiny germ, in the old sense of the word, the first living point from which a plant or a creature grows, and it develops until it becomes an understanding of life. The line joins the smallest thing in nature to the largest thing a mind can hold, and shows no body, no place and no time in between.
Meaning
The tradition reads its images as symbols, and this one almost says outright what it is a symbol of: growth from a single beginning. Our keyword is Growth from a germ, and our keynote says that from one living origin, successive capacities open. The word successive matters. Understanding here is not given all at once; it unfolds the way a seed does, one leaf and then another. One way to read a placement in this degree is as a mind that trusts slow development, that sees large meanings in small starts and is content to let a thing grow before it is judged. The picture also suggests modesty: what becomes an understanding of life begins as something almost too small to see.
Read after Lynda Hill, the neighbouring degrees frame the placement: the one before is its background, the one after the way it is heading. Before this degree comes Cancer 16, the man studying a manuscript beside a square, order sought in writing and forms; after it comes Cancer 18, a mother hen digging for food for her brood. By her rule the study of written pattern becomes the living growth of a seed, and that growth leads straight into the plain daily work of feeding the young. As a reading aid, the opposite degree, Capricorn 17, keyword Private freedom, shows a girl bathing alone and unseen: a private moment of ease in the body, set beside this degree's slow, inward unfolding of understanding.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Cancer 16°00′ up to, but not including, Cancer 17°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Cancer 16°10′ reads Cancer 17, and so does one at Cancer 16°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Cancer 18 after Cancer 16°59′, or back into Cancer 16 before Cancer 16°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 17 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Cancer 16, Cancer 18 and Capricorn 17 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 16 and Cancer 18, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Capricorn 17, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Cancer 16°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Cancer 17; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Cancer 16. 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: From one living origin, successive capacities open.
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 16: Study of pattern the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Cancer 18: Providing the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Capricorn 17: Private freedom the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Cancer in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
