The image
The picture is a comic farmyard. Some chickens have got hold of something that has gone to their heads, fermented grain or spilled mash, and now they stagger, flap and strut with a confidence their legs cannot back up. The line says only that they are drunk; it gives no farmer and no cause. Chickens are not grand birds at the best of times, and the picture makes the most of that: small creatures behaving as though they could fly.
Meaning
Read as the tradition reads its images, the tipsy chickens are a symbol of overconfidence, and they are funny before they are anything else. Our keyword is Misjudged capacity, and our keynote says that stimulation makes one attempt what one is not built for. The fault is not in the chickens but in the mismatch, a sudden boost of daring in a body built for scratching the yard. One way to read a placement in this degree is as an appetite for excitement that can outrun good judgement, and as the humour to laugh at oneself afterwards. It can also be read kindly: sometimes a little daring shows a creature what it could try, even if the first try is clumsy.
Lynda Hill's rule turns the eye one degree back, for background, and one degree on, for heading. The background here is Leo 20, the Zuni honouring the Sun, reverence for the light; the heading is Leo 22, a homing pigeon carrying a message. By her rule the solemn picture gives way to a comic one of misjudged excess, and the staggering hens give way in turn to a bird that knows its way home and goes there straight, the sober answer to a tipsy farmyard. As a reading aid, the opposite degree, Aquarius 21, shows a woman let down, her illusions gone, whose keyword is Courage after loss: the sobering that follows a high, beside this degree's high before the sobering.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Leo 20°00′ up to, but not including, Leo 21°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Leo 20°08′ reads Leo 21, and so does one at Leo 20°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Leo 22 after Leo 20°59′, or back into Leo 20 before Leo 20°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 21 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Leo 20, Leo 22 and Aquarius 21 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 20 and Leo 22, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Aquarius 21, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Leo 20°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Leo 21; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Leo 20. 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: Stimulation makes one attempt what one is not built for.
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 20: Reverence for the Sun the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Leo 22: Faithful delivery the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Aquarius 21: Courage after loss the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Leo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
