A choir singing in its everyday clothes

The image

The picture is a choir as it really is. The singers belong to a church and they are singing, but they are not in robes; they wear the clothes they came in, work clothes and Sunday best mixed together. The line does not say whether this is a rehearsal or a service, nor what they sing. Without robes, each singer is visibly someone: the grocer, the teacher, the girl from the next street. Together they make one sound.

Meaning

Read as a symbol, which is how the tradition reads every degree image, the unrobed choir is about ordinary people joining in something larger. Our keyword is Shared devotion, and our keynote says that ordinary people join voices for something beyond themselves. The missing robes are the striking detail. A robe hides the individual inside the group; here the individuals stay visible and the group forms anyway. One way to read a placement in this degree is as a wish to belong to something worth singing for while remaining oneself, and as a feeling for the dignity of everyday people when they do something together with their whole hearts.

After Lynda Hill, the degrees on either side of a placement are its context: behind it the background, ahead of it the aim. Behind this one is Leo 16, the sun breaking out as the storm passes, a clear and simple light; ahead is Leo 18, someone who teaches chemistry. By her rule the clear air after the storm fills with ordinary voices raised together, and the next degree turns from song to study, from devotion to the patient explaining of how things change. As a reading aid, the opposite degree, Aquarius 17, shows a guard dog keeping watch: a loyalty that serves silently and alone, beside this degree's loyalty that sings out in company.

In a chart

A planet or point anywhere from Leo 16°00′ up to, but not including, Leo 17°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Leo 16°40′ reads Leo 17, and so does one at Leo 16°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Leo 18 after Leo 16°59′, or back into Leo 16 before Leo 16°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 17 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Leo 16, Leo 18 and Aquarius 17 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 16 and Leo 18, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced

Degree opposite

Aquarius 17, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction

A position at Leo 16°00′00″

Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Leo 17; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Leo 16. 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: Ordinary people join voices for something beyond themselves.

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 16: Clearing the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
• Leo 18: Transmitting knowledge of change the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
• Aquarius 17: Loyal vigilance the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
• Leo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to