The image
The picture is a drawing being made. A man works with a pencil, and what appears on the paper is futurist art: the bold, fractured style of the 1910s and 1920s that tried to show speed, machines and the modern city, all angles and lines of force. The line gives no studio and no subject, only the pencil and the kind of picture it makes. The word futurist names a style; it does not mean the drawing shows the future.
Meaning
Read as a symbol, which is how the tradition reads every degree image, the futurist drawing is about the mind sketching forms nobody has seen before. Our keyword is Drawing the future, and our keynote says that the mind sketches forms that do not exist yet. The future here is something designed, not seen in advance. The artist does not see it; he invents it, line by line. One way to read a placement in this degree is as an inventive, forward-looking imagination with a gift for planning, designing and trying out shapes on paper before they are built, and as the restlessness of a mind that finds the present a little slow. The humble pencil matters too: new forms begin as rough sketches.
Taken after Lynda Hill, the drawing has a background one degree back and a heading one degree forward. Behind this one lies Virgo 8, learning to dance for the first time, a body learning rhythm; ahead lies Virgo 10, two heads peering out past the darkness. By her rule the body that has learned to move gives way to a hand that draws new forms, and the drawing gives way to two minds looking together past what blocks the view. The opposite degree, Pisces 9, read beside it as an aid, is a jockey riding a racehorse: speed lived in the body on a track, beside this degree's speed and motion drawn on paper by a still hand.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Virgo 8°00′ up to, but not including, Virgo 9°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Virgo 8°14′ reads Virgo 9, and so does one at Virgo 8°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Virgo 10 after Virgo 8°59′, or back into Virgo 8 before Virgo 8°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 9 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Virgo 8, Virgo 10 and Pisces 9 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 8 and Virgo 10, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Pisces 9, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Virgo 8°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Virgo 9; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Virgo 8. 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 mind sketches forms that do not exist yet.
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 8: Learning rhythm the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Virgo 10: Seeing past doubt the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Pisces 9: Driving for the goal the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Virgo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
