The image
The picture is a farmyard. A hen is at work with her feet, scratching the earth and turning it over so that seeds and small creatures come up, and her brood is around her, ready to eat what she finds. The line says nothing about the farmer, the weather or the size of the brood. The work is low to the ground and never quite finished: one patch scratched, then the next, all day.
Meaning
Read as the tradition reads every degree image, the hen is a symbol of provision, not a rule about how anyone must live. Our keyword is Providing, and our keynote says that steady, humble effort finds food for those who depend on it. There is no heroism in the picture, and that is the point. The hen digs because the chicks are hungry and the food is under the surface. One way to read a placement in this degree is as a practical kind of care, a readiness to do plain work over and over for others, and an eye for what can be found in ordinary ground. It can also be read as the question of who looks after the one who scratches for everyone else.
Lynda Hill's rule reads the degree before as the background of a placement and the degree after as its aim. The background here is Cancer 17, the tiny germ that grows into an understanding of life; the aim is Cancer 19, a wedding conducted by a priest. By her rule the inner growth of the seed comes down to the ground as daily feeding, and the household that has been fed turns toward a public union, care made formal. The opposite degree, Capricorn 18, read beside it as an aid, is the British flag, the Union Jack: order kept on a national scale under a symbol, beside a single hen keeping her small brood fed.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Cancer 17°00′ up to, but not including, Cancer 18°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Cancer 17°47′ reads Cancer 18, and so does one at Cancer 17°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Cancer 19 after Cancer 17°59′, or back into Cancer 17 before Cancer 17°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 18 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Cancer 17, Cancer 19 and Capricorn 18 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 17 and Cancer 19, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Capricorn 18, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Cancer 17°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Cancer 18; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Cancer 17. 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: Steady, humble effort finds food for those who depend on it.
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 17: Growth from a germ the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Cancer 19: Sanctioned union the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Capricorn 18: Protected order the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Cancer in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
