The image
The picture takes a historical name and moves it forward. Pocahontas, the young Powhatan woman of early colonial Virginia whom American popular memory turned into a legend of meeting between peoples, appears as if she lived now. The line gives no setting and no other figures. The legend the image draws on is the colonists' telling more than her people's.
Meaning
The tradition reads its images as symbols, and this one works through a story widely told in 1925 America, which is a legend as much as a life. Our keyword is Bridging worlds, and our keynote says that a love that bridges two peoples asks both to make room. We read the image for the bridge, not for the legend's romance. One way to read a placement in this degree is as a life lived between two worlds, families, cultures or ways of thinking, where loyalty to both is asked for and neither side finds it easy. Putting the figure in our own time suggests that the same crossing goes on now, and that the room has to be made on both sides of it, not on one.
Lynda Hill's names for the two neighbours are the Karmic Condition, behind, and the Quest Degree, ahead, and she reads them as where a placement comes from and where it goes. Before this degree comes Cancer 27, the storm roaring in a narrow canyon; after it comes Cancer 29, a Muse finding the weight of a pair of twins. By her rule strong, confined feeling opens into a meeting between peoples, and that meeting leads to a weighing of two things born together, the choice between two sides made into a picture of its own. The opposite degree, Capricorn 28, read beside it as an aid, is a great cage full of birds: many kinds held together in one enclosure, against an image where two worlds meet freely or not at all.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Cancer 27°00′ up to, but not including, Cancer 28°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Cancer 27°57′ reads Cancer 28, and so does one at Cancer 27°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Cancer 29 after Cancer 27°59′, or back into Cancer 27 before Cancer 27°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 28 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Cancer 27, Cancer 29 and Capricorn 28 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 27 and Cancer 29, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Capricorn 28, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Cancer 27°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Cancer 28; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Cancer 27. 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: A love that bridges two peoples asks both to make room.
Claims about it
-
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.
-
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.
-
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 27: Confined violence the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Cancer 29: Weighing alternatives the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Capricorn 28: Contained variety the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Cancer in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
