The image
The picture is a workshop and a furnace. A glassblower gathers molten glass on the end of a long pipe, blows into it, turns it, reheats it and shapes it with simple tools, until a bubble of fire becomes a bowl, a bottle or a lamp. The line names only the craftsman and the craft. Everything about the work is a matter of timing: glass is shaped only while it glows, and it holds its form once it cools.
Meaning
Read as a symbol, which is how the tradition reads every degree image, the glassblower is about making lasting forms out of something fluid and fragile. Our keyword is Shaping glass, and our keynote says that fragile, lasting forms are made by a practised hand and patient skill. Two things meet in the image: breath, which is the most personal thing a person has, and fire, which is the most dangerous tool in the shop. One way to read a placement in this degree is as a gift for shaping something delicate with care and good timing, a craft learned over years, and as the steadiness needed to work with heat without being burned. The finished glass is clear and breakable, and the image honours both of those qualities.
Lynda Hill's reading gives the glassblower a background in the previous degree and a direction in the next. Behind this degree is Leo 8, the revolutionary agitator spreading his message, heat aimed at the world; ahead is Leo 10, dew on the ground at dawn. By her rule the agitator's fire is brought into a workshop and made to serve a careful hand, and after the furnace the next degree opens on the coolest, quietest picture there is, water on the grass at first light. The opposite degree, Aquarius 9, read beside it as an aid, is a flag that has become an eagle: a made symbol turning into a living power, beside a living breath turned into a made and lasting thing.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Leo 8°00′ up to, but not including, Leo 9°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Leo 8°44′ reads Leo 9, and so does one at Leo 8°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Leo 10 after Leo 8°59′, or back into Leo 8 before Leo 8°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 9 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Leo 8, Leo 10 and Aquarius 9 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 8 and Leo 10, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Aquarius 9, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Leo 8°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Leo 9; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Leo 8. 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: Fragile, lasting forms are made by a practised hand and patient skill.
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 8: Zeal for change the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Leo 10: Freshness revealed the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Aquarius 9: Symbol becomes power the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Leo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
