The image
The picture is the night sky, clear and full. Stars are scattered across it, and the eye joins them into patterns, the constellations people have named and drawn for thousands of years. The line gives no watcher and no season, and it does not name any figure. What it gives is order at a vast scale, visible without any instrument, the same pattern for everyone who looks up on the same night, wherever they stand.
Meaning
Read as the tradition reads its images, the starry sky is a symbol of pattern that is larger than any one life. Our keyword is Enduring pattern, and our keynote says that vast order is visible to anyone who looks up. The image does not say the stars rule anything. It says they are there, arranged, and that the arrangement can be seen. One way to read a placement in this degree is as a sense of the big picture, a feeling for the patterns behind daily events and an urge to see one's own place among them. The patterns are also partly made by the watcher, since the lines between the stars are drawn by human eyes, so the image can be read as a gift for finding shape in what is scattered.
Lynda Hill reads the degree behind a placement as what it grows from and the degree ahead as where it goes. Behind this one is Leo 6, the woman of the old school beside the young flapper, two generations face to face; ahead is Leo 8, a revolutionary agitator spreading his message. By her rule the quarrel of generations is set against a sky that does not change, and from that fixed order the next degree turns to someone who wants to overturn the order on the ground. The opposite degree, Aquarius 7, can be read beside it as a reading aid: an infant breaking out of an eggshell, the smallest new beginning, against the widest and oldest picture in the sky.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Leo 6°00′ up to, but not including, Leo 7°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Leo 6°30′ reads Leo 7, and so does one at Leo 6°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Leo 8 after Leo 6°59′, or back into Leo 6 before Leo 6°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 7 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Leo 6, Leo 8 and Aquarius 7 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 6 and Leo 8, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Aquarius 7, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Leo 6°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Leo 7; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Leo 6. 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: Vast order is visible to anyone who looks up.
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 6: Clash of generations the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Leo 8: Zeal for change the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Aquarius 7: New kind of birth the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Leo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
