The image
The picture is a whole town at once. Mumps, a childhood complaint that once went round schools and streets every few years, is moving through a community, and the line gives no single patient, only the spread. In 1925 such a wave meant closed classrooms, children kept at home and neighbours comparing notes over the fence: an experience everyone shared whether they caught it or not.
Meaning
The tradition reads its images as symbols, and this one is read for what a shared experience does to a group. Our keyword is Shared affliction, and our keynote says that a common condition spreads through a group and must be lived through together. What is striking is the scale. The previous degree showed one man struck down; this one shows a whole community going through the same thing. One way to read a placement here is as sensitivity to the moods and troubles that move through a family, a school or a workplace, and as a capacity to sit it out with others rather than alone. The image also carries a plain fact of such waves: they come, they run their course and they pass.
Lynda Hill's practice places each degree between its background, the degree before, and its direction, the degree after. The background here is Leo 1, a man struck by apoplexy, a sudden halt in one person; the direction is Leo 3, a woman's long hair cut short into a bob. By her rule the private shock becomes a shared one, and once the wave has passed the next degree turns to something chosen and personal, a new way of meeting the world. The opposite degree, Aquarius 2, read beside it as an aid, is a thunderstorm nobody saw coming, whose keyword is Sudden clearing: another thing that sweeps over everyone at once, and that leaves the air fresher once it has gone.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Leo 1°00′ up to, but not including, Leo 2°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Leo 1°25′ reads Leo 2, and so does one at Leo 1°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Leo 3 after Leo 1°59′, or back into Leo 1 before Leo 1°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 Leo 2 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Leo 1, Leo 3 and Aquarius 2 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
- Leo 1 and Leo 3, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Aquarius 2, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Leo 1°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Leo 2; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Leo 1. 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 common condition spreads through a group and must be lived through together.
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
- Leo 1: Overreach the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Leo 3: Self-fashioning the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Aquarius 2: Sudden clearing the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Leo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
