Guests at a garden party as the light fades

The image

The picture is the end of a summer day in company. People are gathered on a lawn for a garden party, with talk, food and drink, perhaps music, and the evening is falling: the light going golden, then blue, lamps perhaps being lit. The line gives no host and no occasion. What it holds is the hour, when the work of the day is over and nobody is ready to go in.

Meaning

The tradition reads its images as symbols, and the garden party is a symbol of ease among others. Our keyword is Social ease, and our keynote says that people enjoy each other's company outdoors as the day ends. The setting does a lot of work. Outdoors, people move freely between groups; at evening, the pace slows. One way to read a placement in this degree is as a talent for gathering people and making them comfortable, a host's instinct or a guest's charm, and as an appreciation of the hours when nothing has to be achieved. Because the party is at the end of the day, the image can also carry a hint of looking back, the pleasure of company after a long effort.

Lynda Hill's practice places a degree between its background, the one before, and its direction, the one after. The background here is Leo 11, children swinging under a giant oak, play made safe by something strong; the direction is Leo 13, an elderly ship's captain in his rocking chair. By her rule the play of children becomes the ease of adults on the lawn, and the evening party leads on to the quiet of old age, one man rocking and remembering. The opposite degree, Aquarius 12, read beside it as an aid, is people on a flight of stairs, each a step above the last: a company ranked by level, beside this degree's company where everyone mingles on the same flat lawn.

In a chart

A planet or point anywhere from Leo 11°00′ up to, but not including, Leo 12°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Leo 11°35′ reads Leo 12, and so does one at Leo 11°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Leo 13 after Leo 11°59′, or back into Leo 11 before Leo 11°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 12 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Leo 11, Leo 13 and Aquarius 12 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 11 and Leo 13, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced

Degree opposite

Aquarius 12, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction

A position at Leo 11°00′00″

Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Leo 12; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Leo 11. 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: People enjoy each other's company outdoors as the day ends.

Claims about it

• The image line on this page, or on any site, is Elsie Wheeler's own wording.

  false

  What 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.

• Reading the degree before and the degree after is part of how the zodiac is built, or of Jones's method.

  false

  What the record shows: It is Lynda Hill's practice, and the two names are hers. We show the two degrees with her name.

• Dane Rudhyar's 1973 lines are the Sabian symbols and free to print.

  false

  What 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 11: Supported play the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
• Leo 13: Earned rest the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
• Aquarius 12: Levels of development the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
• Leo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to