The image
The picture is music on the water. Gondolas, the long black boats rowed standing up, glide along, and from them comes a serenade, a love song sung in the open air to someone who listens. The line does not say who sings, the gondolier or a passenger, nor who the song is for. A serenade from a gondola is part romance and part custom: the boat, the song and the evening all belong to the experience being offered.
Meaning
Read as a symbol, which is how the tradition reads every degree image, the serenade is about beauty given to others as part of a shared occasion. Our keyword is Romance as service, and our keynote says that beauty is given to others as part of a trade. That is the honest edge of the picture. A gondola song may be heartfelt, and it is also the boatman's craft, sung for whoever is aboard. One way to read a placement in this degree is as a gift for creating atmosphere for others, for making an evening lovely, and as the question of when such a gift is offered from the heart and when it is part of the work, which may be both at once without being any less real.
Lynda Hill's way of reading places the serenade between its background and its heading. Behind this one is Cancer 19, a wedding conducted by a priest, a union made formal; ahead is Cancer 21, an opera diva in song. By her rule the public rite gives way to an easier kind of romance on the water, and the boatman's song in turn leads to a trained voice that fills a hall on its own. The opposite degree, Capricorn 20, can be read beside it as an aid: the voices of a choir singing from out of sight. There the singers are hidden and the song belongs to everyone; here the singer is close, in the boat, and the song is sung for a few.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Cancer 19°00′ up to, but not including, Cancer 20°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Cancer 19°01′ reads Cancer 20, and so does one at Cancer 19°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Cancer 21 after Cancer 19°59′, or back into Cancer 19 before Cancer 19°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 20 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Cancer 19, Cancer 21 and Capricorn 20 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 19 and Cancer 21, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Capricorn 20, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Cancer 19°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Cancer 20; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Cancer 19. 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: Beauty is given to others as part of a trade.
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 19: Sanctioned union the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Cancer 21: Virtuoso self-expression the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Capricorn 20: Unseen voices the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Cancer in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
