The image
The picture is a man with a cause. He is an agitator, someone who stirs people up, and his message is revolution: the old order should be overturned. The line gives no crowd, no flag and no country, so the cause itself is left open. What it shows is the role: a person who goes out to spread an idea, on street corners, in leaflets, in halls, wherever people can be reached.
Meaning
The tradition reads its images as symbols, and the agitator is read as a figure of conviction. Our keyword is Zeal for change, and our keynote says that conviction works to overturn the existing order. The picture is neither praised nor condemned in the line. Agitators have been both right and wrong, and the energy is the same either way. One way to read a placement in this degree is as a strong urge to speak out for change, a fire that wants to spread an idea to others, and as the question of what such fire is aimed at and what it leaves standing. Another is the gift of persuasion itself, the knack of making a message carry.
Lynda Hill's practice frames each degree with the one before as its background and the one after as its direction. The background here is Leo 7, star patterns spread over the heavens, an order nobody can change; the direction is Leo 9, a craftsman blowing glass. By her rule the fixed order of the sky gives way to a man who wants to change the order of the world, and his heat in turn becomes, in the next degree, the steady heat of a furnace in skilled hands. As a reading aid, the opposite degree, Aquarius 8, shows waxwork figures dressed in fine gowns, perfect and lifeless, beside this degree's figure who is all life and wants nothing left as it is.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Leo 7°00′ up to, but not including, Leo 8°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Leo 7°07′ reads Leo 8, and so does one at Leo 7°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Leo 9 after Leo 7°59′, or back into Leo 7 before Leo 7°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 8 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Leo 7, Leo 9 and Aquarius 8 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 7 and Leo 9, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Aquarius 8, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Leo 7°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Leo 8; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Leo 7. 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: Conviction works to overturn the existing order.
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 7: Enduring pattern the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Leo 9: Shaping glass the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Aquarius 8: Perfect but lifeless the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Leo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
