A great soprano singing to a full house

The image

The picture is a single singer at the top of her art. A diva, in the old sense of a leading lady of the opera, is in full song, and the line gives nothing else: no stage, no role, no audience, though all of them are implied. Opera singing is unamplified; one human voice, trained for years, has to carry over an orchestra to the last row.

Meaning

Read as the tradition reads its images, the diva is a symbol of expression brought to its fullest. Our keyword is Virtuoso self-expression, and our keynote says that one voice, trained to its height, commands the hall. Two things meet in the figure: a natural gift and a long discipline. Nobody sings like that by chance, and nobody sings like that without something to start from. One way to read a placement in this degree is as a wish to be heard completely, to bring a talent to the point where it fills a room, and as the work and nerve that this takes. The word diva has also come to mean temperament, and the picture can carry that edge too.

Lynda Hill reads the degree behind a placement as its background and the degree ahead as its direction. Behind this one is Cancer 20, the serenade from the gondolas, a song sung for a few in a boat; ahead is Cancer 22, a woman watching for a sailing boat to come in. By her rule the small serenade grows into a voice that commands a hall, and after the applause the next degree turns to someone alone at the shore, waiting and listening for what is still far off. As a reading aid, the opposite degree, Capricorn 21, shows runners passing the baton in a relay. There the effort is handed on and shared along a team; here one performer carries the whole of it alone.

In a chart

A planet or point anywhere from Cancer 20°00′ up to, but not including, Cancer 21°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Cancer 20°38′ reads Cancer 21, and so does one at Cancer 20°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Cancer 22 after Cancer 20°59′, or back into Cancer 20 before Cancer 20°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 21 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Cancer 20, Cancer 22 and Capricorn 21 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 20 and Cancer 22, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced

Degree opposite

Capricorn 21, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction

A position at Cancer 20°00′00″

Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Cancer 21; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Cancer 20. 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: One voice, trained to its height, commands the hall.

Claims about it

• The image line on this page, or on any site, is Elsie Wheeler's own wording.

  false

  What 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.

• Reading the degree before and the degree after is part of how the zodiac is built, or of Jones's method.

  false

  What the record shows: It is Lynda Hill's practice, and the two names are hers. We show the two degrees with her name.

• Dane Rudhyar's 1973 lines are the Sabian symbols and free to print.

  false

  What 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 20: Romance as service the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
• Cancer 22: Expectant waiting the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
• Capricorn 21: Passing the baton the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
• Cancer in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to