The image
The picture is a coming. Two angels, figures of light from religious art and story, arrive with a purpose: to guard. The line does not say whom or what they protect, nor from what, and it gives no setting. Angels in paintings often stand on either side of a door, a bed or a child, and a pair suggests watch kept from both sides at once.
Meaning
The tradition reads its images as symbols, and the guardian angels stand for care that watches over without being asked. Our keyword is Protection, and our keynote says that unseen care watches over the vulnerable. The picture is read here as a symbol of care. One way to read a placement in this degree is as an instinct to look after the vulnerable, a protective streak that stands watch for others, and as a sense of being looked after oneself, by family, friends or something larger, even when that care is not visible. The angels come in a pair, and the image can also be read as protection that is shared, not carried alone.
As Lynda Hill reads them, the neighbouring degrees give the angels a background and a direction. Behind this one lies Virgo 2, a great white cross lifted high, one ruling symbol; ahead lies Virgo 4, children of different colours playing together. By her rule the raised symbol of faith becomes two guardians arriving, and what they guard, in the next degree, looks very like a group of children at play, mixing freely before anyone has told them otherwise. As a reading aid, the opposite degree, Pisces 3, shows trees long since turned to stone: a past held still and safe for ever, beside this degree's living watch kept over what is still growing.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Virgo 2°00′ up to, but not including, Virgo 3°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Virgo 2°32′ reads Virgo 3, and so does one at Virgo 2°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Virgo 4 after Virgo 2°59′, or back into Virgo 2 before Virgo 2°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 Virgo 3 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Virgo 2, Virgo 4 and Pisces 3 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
- Virgo 2 and Virgo 4, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Pisces 3, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Virgo 2°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Virgo 3; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Virgo 2. 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: Unseen care watches over the vulnerable.
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
- Virgo 2: Dominant faith the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Virgo 4: Natural equality the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Pisces 3: Fossilised past the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Virgo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
