First dance lessons: finding the beat

The image

The picture is a first lesson. Someone, child or adult, is learning to dance, perhaps counting under their breath, watching a teacher's feet, stepping on a partner's toes. The line gives no dance hall and no music, though both are implied. Everything about a first dance lesson is awkward and hopeful at once: the steps are simple, but the body does not know them yet, and the rhythm has to be found from outside before it can be felt from within.

Meaning

The tradition reads its images as symbols, and the first dance lesson stands for the body learning to move in time with others. Our keyword is Learning rhythm, and our keynote says that the body begins to learn how to move with others and with music. The key word is begins. The lesson is not a performance; mistakes are expected. One way to read a placement in this degree is as a readiness, or a need, to learn the rhythm of a group, to fit one's movements to a partner, a team or a new setting, and as the patience to be clumsy for a while on the way to grace. It can also stand for the plain pleasure of a body finding music it did not know it could follow.

Lynda Hill places the beginner between a background, the degree behind, and a direction, the degree ahead. The background here is Virgo 7, the women's quarters of a harem, lives bound to one authority; the direction is Virgo 9, futurist art taking shape under a man's pencil. By her rule the enclosed household gives way to someone learning to move freely to music, and that first freedom of the body leads in the next degree to a mind drawing new forms of its own. As a reading aid, the opposite degree, Pisces 8, shows a bugle call from a girl: a clear signal that calls others to attention, beside this degree's beginner listening hard for a beat set by someone else.

In a chart

A planet or point anywhere from Virgo 7°00′ up to, but not including, Virgo 8°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Virgo 7°37′ reads Virgo 8, and so does one at Virgo 7°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Virgo 9 after Virgo 7°59′, or back into Virgo 7 before Virgo 7°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 8 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Virgo 7, Virgo 9 and Pisces 8 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 7 and Virgo 9, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced

Degree opposite

Pisces 8, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction

A position at Virgo 7°00′00″

Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Virgo 8; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Virgo 7. 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: The body begins to learn how to move with others and with music.

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 7: Many bound to one the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
• Virgo 9: Drawing the future the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
• Pisces 8: Call to attention the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
• Virgo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to