Little brownies dancing as the sun goes down

The image

As the sun sets, a group of brownies, the small helpful sprites of British folk tales, come out and dance. The picture is all movement and dusk: low light, little figures, a dance with no audience but the evening. In the stories brownies did household work unseen and asked for little in return; here they are not working but playing.

Meaning

The tradition reads the dance as the lighter side of life that appears when the day's effort is over. Sunset marks a change of mood, and the brownies are the small, quick spirits of fancy and fun that the working day keeps out of sight. Our keyword is Evening merriment, and our keynote puts it simply: small, light spirits come out to play as daylight fades. In a chart one way to read a placement here is as a place where imagination, humour and lightness have their hour, often after duty has been done. The image does not mock the work that came before; it shows the pleasure that follows it.

By Lynda Hill's practice the degree before is the Karmic Condition and the degree after the Quest Degree. Aries 15, before it, is the weaver at her loom; Aries 17, after it, is two prim, unmarried women. Read that way, the dance grows out of patient work and gives way to a quieter, more reserved companionship: play between labour and restraint. The degree opposite, Libra 16, is a jetty for boats, swept off by the water, something built and then lost, which can be read beside it as a reading aid: the brownies leave nothing behind, while the jetty has to be rebuilt.

In a chart

A planet or point anywhere from Aries 15°00′ up to, but not including, Aries 16°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Aries 15°03′ reads Aries 16, and so does one at Aries 15°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Aries 17 after Aries 15°59′, or back into Aries 15 before Aries 15°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 Aries 16 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Aries 15, Aries 17 and Libra 16 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

Aries 15 and Aries 17, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced

Degree opposite

Libra 16, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction

A position at Aries 15°00′00″

Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Aries 16; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Aries 15. 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: Small, light spirits come out to play as daylight fades.

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

• Aries 15: Patterned craft the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
• Aries 17: Shared reserve the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
• Libra 16: Rebuilding the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
• Aries in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to