The image
The picture names a people and a gesture. The Zuni, a Pueblo people of New Mexico who live there today, are shown honouring the Sun. The line gives no ceremony, no dance and no detail, and this page adds none: Zuni religious life belongs to the Zuni, and the image is an outsider's picture from 1925, not a description of it. What the line holds is reverence turned toward the source of daylight.
Meaning
The tradition reads its images as symbols, and this one is read for the attitude it shows, not as an account of any people's beliefs. Our keyword is Reverence for the Sun, and our keynote says that a people honour the light that their life depends on. The image sits in Leo, the sign astrologers give to the Sun, and it pictures thanks rather than control: the Sun is not used, only honoured. One way to read a placement in this degree is as a feeling of gratitude for what sustains life, the warmth, the harvest, the people who keep a community going, and as a wish to mark that gratitude together and out loud.
In Lynda Hill's practice the degree one step back gives the background and the degree one step on gives the aim. Before Leo 20 comes Leo 19, a party on board a houseboat, pleasure taken lightly on the water; after it comes Leo 21, drunken chickens, a comic picture of creatures that have taken more than they can handle. By her rule light pleasure gives way to reverence, and reverence, as if the image wanted to keep its feet on the ground, is followed by a farmyard picture of misjudged excess. The opposite degree, Aquarius 20, read beside it as an aid, is news carried by a great white dove: a message of peace coming down from the sky, beside this degree's thanks sent up toward the Sun.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Leo 19°00′ up to, but not including, Leo 20°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Leo 19°31′ reads Leo 20, and so does one at Leo 19°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Leo 21 after Leo 19°59′, or back into Leo 19 before Leo 19°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 20 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Leo 19, Leo 21 and Aquarius 20 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 19 and Leo 21, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Aquarius 20, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Leo 19°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Leo 20; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Leo 19. 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: A people honour the light that their life depends on.
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 19: Floating festivity the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Leo 21: Misjudged capacity the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Aquarius 20: Message of peace the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Leo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
