The image
The picture is a rainbow, seen from below. It spans the sky in a single arc, its colours in their usual order from red on the outside to violet within, and the line gives nothing else: no land, no people, no pot of gold. A rainbow needs sun and rain at once, with the sun behind the watcher and the rain in front, so it appears only when the weather is mixed. Everyone in the same place sees one, though each sees it from a slightly different angle.
Meaning
The tradition reads its images as symbols, and the rainbow has been a symbol of a bridge or a promise in many stories. Our keyword is Bridge of colour, and our keynote says that light and rain together make a sign that everyone can see. The word together carries the picture. Neither the sun alone nor the rain alone makes a rainbow; it takes both at once. One way to read a placement in this degree is as a gift for bringing contrasts together into something beautiful, joy and sorrow, sun and storm, and as a liking for signs that are shared openly rather than kept private. It can also be read as hope that is honest about the rain, since the arc appears only while the rain is still falling.
Lynda Hill names the earlier neighbour the Karmic Condition and the later one the Quest Degree, and reads them as background and heading. Before this degree comes Leo 25, the camel crossing the dry sands; after it comes Leo 27, the first light of day. By her rule the long dry passage gives way to rain and light together, and the rainbow in turn gives way to the earliest light of a new morning, colour followed by dawn. As a reading aid, the opposite degree, Aquarius 26, shows a hydrometer, the float that gauges a liquid's density: a precise instrument for an unseen quality, beside the most visible and least measurable thing in the sky.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Leo 25°00′ up to, but not including, Leo 26°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Leo 25°13′ reads Leo 26, and so does one at Leo 25°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Leo 27 after Leo 25°59′, or back into Leo 25 before Leo 25°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 26 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Leo 25, Leo 27 and Aquarius 26 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 25 and Leo 27, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Aquarius 26, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Leo 25°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Leo 26; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Leo 25. 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: Light and rain together make a sign that everyone can see.
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 25: Endurance the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Leo 27: Beginning of awareness the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Aquarius 26: Measuring the charge the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Leo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
