The image
The picture is a landscape with no people in it. At the brink of a cliff stand rocks that nobody carved: wind, rain, frost and time have worn them into shapes, perhaps strange ones, the kind that people give names to. The line does not say whether the sea is below or a valley, nor how high the drop is. Everything in it is slow; the rocks reached their form over ages and they hold it at the very edge.
Meaning
Read as a symbol, which is how the tradition reads every degree image, the rocks are about what lasts because it has been worn into its shape. Our keyword is Enduring structure, and our keynote says that what has hardened over ages stands at the brink and holds. The position at the cliff's edge gives the picture its tension. These rocks are exposed to everything, and that exposure is what made them. One way to read a placement in this degree is as a steadiness that has been formed by long weathering, a character, a habit or an institution that has kept its ground where little else could, and as the dignity of forms that nobody designed.
Lynda Hill's rule sets every degree between the one before, read as background, and the one after, read as heading. The background here is Leo 4, the formal man beside the calm deer, polish and wildness at peace; the heading is Leo 6, a woman of the old school next to a modern young flapper. By her rule the meeting of the made and the natural gives way to forms that only nature made, and that ageless stone leads to a very human meeting between an older generation and a younger one. The opposite degree, Aquarius 5, read beside it as an aid, is the ancestors gathered in council: the past as a living presence that advises, beside the past as rock that stands silent at the edge.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Leo 4°00′ up to, but not including, Leo 5°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Leo 4°16′ reads Leo 5, and so does one at Leo 4°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Leo 6 after Leo 4°59′, or back into Leo 4 before Leo 4°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 5 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Leo 4, Leo 6 and Aquarius 5 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 4 and Leo 6, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Aquarius 5, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Leo 4°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Leo 5; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Leo 4. 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: What has hardened over ages stands at the brink and holds.
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 4: Civilised and wild together the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Leo 6: Clash of generations the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Aquarius 5: Backed by the past the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Leo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
