The image
The image is of two people together and a serpent curled close by, near enough to be part of the scene. Nothing is said about what the snake does; it is simply there, watchful and still, beside the pair. The scene recalls the oldest story of a man, a woman and a snake, though the picture names no garden and no fruit.
Meaning
The tradition reads the snake as knowledge, the awareness that comes with closeness and that cannot be unlearned. When two people come together, they also come to see difference, desire and choice, and the relationship is no longer innocent. Our keyword is Knowledge and temptation, and our keynote sets it out: awareness of duality enters the first relationship and changes it. In a chart this image could be read as a place where intimacy brings questions with it, where understanding grows through tension, and where a person meets what draws them as well as what they draw near to. It is a picture of change within a bond, not of its success or failure.
Lynda Hill calls the degree before a placement its Karmic Condition and the one after its Quest Degree. Before Aries 14 is Aries 13, the bomb that failed to explode; after it is Aries 15, a Native weaver working a blanket on her loom. Read by that rule, a charged but harmless moment opens onto the knowledge the snake brings, and that knowledge is carried forward into patient, patterned work. As a reading aid, Libra 14 sits opposite: a midday siesta, rest at the right hour, a calm pause beside this degree's watchful one.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Aries 13°00′ up to, but not including, Aries 14°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Aries 13°49′ reads Aries 14, and so does one at Aries 13°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Aries 15 after Aries 13°59′, or back into Aries 13 before Aries 13°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 Aries 14 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Aries 13, Aries 15 and Libra 14 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
- Aries 13 and Aries 15, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Libra 14, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Aries 13°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Aries 14; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Aries 13. 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: Awareness of duality enters the first relationship and changes it.
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
- Aries 13: Force that fizzles the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Aries 15: Patterned craft the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Libra 14: Timely rest the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Aries in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
