Inside the women's quarters of a harem

The image

The picture is a set of rooms closed to outsiders. In a harem, the household of a ruler or a powerful man in some older societies, the women lived in their own quarters, apart from the public rooms. The line gives no figures, no décor and no story. It is a picture of the kind Europeans and Americans painted and imagined in the early twentieth century, more fantasy than fact, and this page reads it as such.

Meaning

Read as the tradition reads its images, the harem quarters are a symbol of many lives gathered under one rule. Our keyword is Many bound to one, and our keynote says that several lives are gathered under a single dominant authority. The picture can be read from two sides. From outside, it is an image of control, one household and one master. From inside, it is also a world of its own, where the women shared rooms, talk and loyalties that the master never saw. One way to read a placement in this degree is as a sensitivity to hierarchies and to the people bound within them, and as the question of how much of one's life is arranged around another's authority.

Lynda Hill frames a degree with its neighbours, the first as where it comes from and the second as where it goes. Before this degree comes Virgo 6, a carousel turning, pleasure going round and round; after it comes Virgo 8, learning to dance for the first time. By her rule the closed circle of the carousel becomes the closed circle of the harem, and from that enclosed world the next degree turns to a beginner's first steps in a dance, a body learning to move freely with others. As a reading aid, the opposite degree, Pisces 7, shows rocks with a cross laid across them: a single sign of sacrifice at rest on the ground, beside this degree's many lives held under a single human power.

In a chart

A planet or point anywhere from Virgo 6°00′ up to, but not including, Virgo 7°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Virgo 6°00′ reads Virgo 7, and so does one at Virgo 6°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Virgo 8 after Virgo 6°59′, or back into Virgo 6 before Virgo 6°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 7 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Virgo 6, Virgo 8 and Pisces 7 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 6 and Virgo 8, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced

Degree opposite

Pisces 7, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction

A position at Virgo 6°00′00″

Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Virgo 7; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Virgo 6. 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: Several lives are gathered under a single dominant authority.

Claims about it

• The image line on this page, or on any site, is Elsie Wheeler's own wording.

  false

  What 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.

  false

  What 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.

  false

  What 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 6: Circular motion the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
• Virgo 8: Learning rhythm the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
• Pisces 7: The cross at rest the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
• Virgo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to