At the bench: someone who teaches chemistry

The image

The picture is a person defined by a subject. Someone teaches chemistry: the science of what substances are made of and how they combine, separate and turn into one another. The line gives no classroom, no students and no experiment, though the mind fills in a bench, glassware and a board covered in symbols. What is distinct is that the figure does not only know chemistry; they pass it on.

Meaning

The tradition reads its images as symbols, and the chemistry teacher stands for knowledge about transformation that is handed on. Our keyword is Transmitting knowledge of change, and our keynote says that understanding how substances transform is passed on. Chemistry was, in 1925, the modern heir of the old alchemists' interest in how one thing becomes another, made clear and testable. One way to read a placement in this degree is as curiosity about how things change and a gift for explaining it, whether the subject is matter, people or ideas, and as the pleasure of watching someone else understand. The teacher in the picture is a link in a chain, receiving and passing on.

Lynda Hill reads the degree behind a placement as what it grows from and the degree ahead as what it reaches toward. The background here is Leo 17, a church choir in everyday clothes, people joined in song; the direction is Leo 19, a party on board a houseboat. By her rule shared devotion is followed by shared knowledge, and after the lesson the next degree turns to pleasure, a party on a home that floats. The opposite degree, Aquarius 18, read beside it as an aid, is a man whose mask has been pulled off: a sudden exposure of what was hidden, beside this degree's patient showing of how hidden changes in matter work.

In a chart

A planet or point anywhere from Leo 17°00′ up to, but not including, Leo 18°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Leo 17°17′ reads Leo 18, and so does one at Leo 17°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Leo 19 after Leo 17°59′, or back into Leo 17 before Leo 17°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 18 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Leo 17, Leo 19 and Aquarius 18 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 17 and Leo 19, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced

Degree opposite

Aquarius 18, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction

A position at Leo 17°00′00″

Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Leo 18; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Leo 17. 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: Understanding how substances transform is passed on.

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 17: Shared devotion the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
• Leo 19: Floating festivity the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
• Aquarius 18: Exposure the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
• Leo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to