The image
The picture is a contrast in two figures. One is a woman of the old school: long skirts, upswept hair, the manners of her mother's time. Beside her is a flapper, the young woman of the 1920s with short hair, short skirt and new freedoms. The line puts them next to each other and leaves it there; it does not say whether they quarrel, ignore each other or get on. Both are women of 1925, and each is what the other is not.
Meaning
The tradition reads its images as symbols, and this one stands for the meeting of an older way of being with its successor. Our keyword is Clash of generations, and our keynote says that the old form of womanhood meets its successor face to face. The word clash may be too strong for what the picture shows, and too weak for what such meetings can feel like. One way to read a placement in this degree is as a life lived between an inherited model and a new one, with loyalty to the first and attraction to the second, or the reverse. Another is the view from outside: two styles side by side make each other visible, and neither is quite the whole truth.
Lynda Hill's reading of the neighbours sets these two women between a background and an aim. Behind this one lies Leo 5, rocks shaped by nature at a cliff's edge, forms that last for ages; ahead lies Leo 7, star patterns spread over the heavens. By her rule the long endurance of stone gives way to the quick change of fashion between mother and daughter, and the next degree lifts the eye to patterns that outlast every generation at once. As a reading aid, the opposite degree, Aquarius 6, shows a player in one of the old mystery dramas: a role worn for a sacred story, beside two women each wearing the costume of her own time.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Leo 5°00′ up to, but not including, Leo 6°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Leo 5°53′ reads Leo 6, and so does one at Leo 5°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Leo 7 after Leo 5°59′, or back into Leo 5 before Leo 5°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 6 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Leo 5, Leo 7 and Aquarius 6 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 5 and Leo 7, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Aquarius 6, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Leo 5°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Leo 6; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Leo 5. 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: The old form of womanhood meets its successor face to face.
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 5: Enduring structure the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Leo 7: Enduring pattern the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Aquarius 6: Ritual role the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Leo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
