The image
The picture is a bird in service. A homing pigeon, bred and trained to return to its loft from far away, carries a message, a small capsule or a slip of paper tied to its leg. The line gives no sender and no reader, and it does not say how far the pigeon has flown. Such birds were once a common way to send news that had to travel faster than a rider.
Meaning
The tradition reads its images as symbols, and the homing pigeon stands for faithful delivery. Our keyword is Faithful delivery, and our keynote says that a message reaches its destination by instinct and training. Both halves of that matter. The pigeon is born with the homing sense, but it has to be trained to use it, flown from farther and farther away. One way to read a placement in this degree is as reliability, a sense of direction that brings a person back to what matters, and as a gift for carrying other people's words without changing them. The bird does not read the message; it simply takes it home, and the picture honours that kind of trust.
Lynda Hill's practice places a degree between the one before, read as background, and the one after, read as aim. The background here is Leo 21, drunken chickens staggering about the farmyard; the aim is Leo 23, a rider on a horse with no saddle. By her rule the birds that lost their bearings are followed by one that never loses them, and the pigeon's sure flight gives way to a rider who must find balance with nothing between herself and the horse. As a reading aid, the opposite degree, Aquarius 22, shows children given a rug on the floor to play upon: a safe, fixed place prepared at home, beside a bird whose whole life is the journey back to one.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Leo 21°00′ up to, but not including, Leo 22°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Leo 21°45′ reads Leo 22, and so does one at Leo 21°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Leo 23 after Leo 21°59′, or back into Leo 21 before Leo 21°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 22 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Leo 21, Leo 23 and Aquarius 22 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 21 and Leo 23, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Aquarius 22, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Leo 21°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Leo 22; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Leo 21. 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 message reaches its destination by instinct and training.
Claims about it
-
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.
-
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.
-
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 21: Misjudged capacity the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Leo 23: Balance without a saddle the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Aquarius 22: A place to play the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Leo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
