The image
The picture joins myth and the nursery. A Muse, one of the goddesses of the arts in Greek story, is weighing twins, two infants born together, as a midwife or nurse might weigh a newborn. The line does not say what the weighing is for or which twin is heavier. It gives the measuring itself and the pair being measured. Twins are alike and not alike, and a scale is the plainest way of telling them apart.
Meaning
Read as the tradition reads its images, the Muse at the scale is a symbol of judgement between two things that arrived together. Our keyword is Weighing alternatives, and our keynote says that two possibilities are born together and must be judged. That the weigher is a Muse matters. She is not a clerk; she belongs to inspiration and the arts, so the weighing is a creative one, the choice between two ideas, two works or two paths that have the same origin. One way to read a placement in this degree is as a habit of holding paired options side by side and measuring them with care, and as the difficulty of choosing when both are dear.
Lynda Hill's practice frames each degree with the one before, as background, and the one after, as where it is heading. The background here is Cancer 28, Pocahontas in our own time, a life between two peoples; the heading is Cancer 30, a member of the DAR, a society of the American Revolution's descendants, the last image of Cancer. By her rule a life between two worlds becomes a weighing of two possibilities, and the weighing settles in the next degree into belonging and lineage, one inheritance chosen and claimed. As a reading aid, the opposite degree, Capricorn 29, shows a woman reading the leaves at the bottom of a teacup: small signs looked at for meaning, beside this degree's careful weighing of two living things on a scale.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Cancer 28°00′ up to, but not including, Cancer 29°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Cancer 28°34′ reads Cancer 29, and so does one at Cancer 28°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Cancer 30 after Cancer 28°59′, or back into Cancer 28 before Cancer 28°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 29 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Cancer 28, Cancer 30 and Capricorn 29 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 28 and Cancer 30, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Capricorn 29, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Cancer 28°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Cancer 29; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Cancer 28. 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: Two possibilities are born together and must be judged.
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 28: Bridging worlds the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Cancer 30: Pride of lineage the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Capricorn 29: Reading small signs the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Cancer in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
