The image
The picture is a ceremony. Two people are being married, and a priest conducts the rite; the line gives no church, no guests and no names, and it does not say which tradition the priest belongs to. What it does say is that the joining is done in public and through an office, not privately: someone with a recognised role speaks the words, and a community is understood to be watching.
Meaning
The tradition reads its images as symbols, and a wedding is one of the oldest symbols there is for two becoming one household. Our keyword is Sanctioned union, and our keynote says that society and spirit together seal the joining of two lives. The priest is the important figure. Without him the picture would be two people in love; with him it is a bond that others recognise and that carries a meaning beyond the two of them. One way to read a placement in this degree is as a wish for commitments that are witnessed and honoured, in work and friendship as well as in love, and as respect for the forms that let a private promise stand in the world.
Lynda Hill reads the degree before a placement as its background, her Karmic Condition, and the degree after as where it is heading, her Quest Degree. Before this degree comes Cancer 18, the mother hen digging to feed her brood, care at the level of the ground; after it comes Cancer 20, a serenade sung from the gondolas. By her rule the household's daily care leads to its formal joining, and the formal rite gives way to song on the water, romance offered more freely and more lightly. As a reading aid, the opposite degree, Capricorn 19, shows a child of five or so hauling an enormous bag of shopping: a small person carrying a household's load, set against the shared load two adults take on here in front of witnesses.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Cancer 18°00′ up to, but not including, Cancer 19°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Cancer 18°24′ reads Cancer 19, and so does one at Cancer 18°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Cancer 20 after Cancer 18°59′, or back into Cancer 18 before Cancer 18°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 19 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Cancer 18, Cancer 20 and Capricorn 19 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 18 and Cancer 20, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Capricorn 19, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Cancer 18°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Cancer 19; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Cancer 18. 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: Society and spirit together seal the joining of two lives.
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 18: Providing the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Cancer 20: Romance as service the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Capricorn 19: Early responsibility the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Cancer in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
