The image
The picture is a fairground ride in motion. Painted horses on brass poles rise and fall, music plays, and the whole platform turns, bringing every rider back past the same point again and again. The line gives no fair, no riders and no tune. A carousel goes nowhere; that is its pleasure. People ride it for the motion, the music and the lights, and get off where they got on.
Meaning
The tradition reads degree images as symbols, and the carousel is a symbol of motion that comes round on itself. Our keyword is Circular motion, and our keynote says that pleasure, or life itself, repeats its round. The picture holds two moods at once. A carousel is fun, music and colour; it is also a ride that never gets anywhere new. One way to read a placement in this degree is as a love of rhythm and repetition, of returning pleasures and familiar cycles, and as the moment of noticing that the same view is coming round again. That moment can bring comfort or a wish to step off, and the image leaves room for both.
Through Lynda Hill's practice, the carousel has a background just behind it and an aim just ahead. Behind this one is Virgo 5, fairies appearing in a sleeping man's dreams; ahead is Virgo 7, the women's quarters of a harem. By her rule the private dream becomes a public ride, painted fancy that turns for everyone, and the turning ride gives way to an image of lives gathered in one enclosed place under one authority. As a reading aid, the opposite degree, Pisces 6, shows officers on parade in their dress uniforms: ordered, straight-line marching meant to impress, beside this degree's round-and-round ride meant only to please.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Virgo 5°00′ up to, but not including, Virgo 6°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Virgo 5°23′ reads Virgo 6, and so does one at Virgo 5°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Virgo 7 after Virgo 5°59′, or back into Virgo 5 before Virgo 5°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 6 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Virgo 5, Virgo 7 and Pisces 6 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 5 and Virgo 7, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Pisces 6, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Virgo 5°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Virgo 6; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Virgo 5. 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: Pleasure, or life itself, repeats its round.
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
- Virgo 5: Dreams of fairies the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Virgo 7: Many bound to one the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Pisces 6: Disciplined display the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Virgo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
