The image
The picture is two heads, side by side, looking out. Around or in front of them is darkness, and they are peering beyond it, as people look out from a shadowed doorway or past the edge of a cave toward the light. The line gives no bodies and no names, and it does not say what they see. The pair matters: two pairs of eyes see more than one, and each head can check what the other thinks it sees.
Meaning
The tradition reads degree images as symbols, and this one is a symbol of looking through doubt with a companion. Our keyword is Seeing past doubt, and our keynote says that two minds together look beyond what obscures the view. The darkness is not defeated; it is looked past. One way to read a placement in this degree is as a mind that does not stop at the first obstacle to understanding, a habit of asking what lies beyond confusion or fear, and as the strength of thinking with someone else, a friend, a partner, a colleague. The image can also be read for its honesty: they are peering, not seeing clearly yet, and they look anyway.
In Lynda Hill's reading the two heads have a background one degree behind and a direction one degree ahead. Behind this one lies Virgo 9, futurist art taking shape under a man's pencil, one mind designing new forms; ahead lies Virgo 11, a son shaped by the hopes his mother holds for him. By her rule the solitary drawing gives way to two minds looking out together, and from that shared gaze the next degree turns to a bond of another kind, one person's hopes shaping another's life. As a reading aid, the opposite degree, Pisces 10, shows a pilot up among the clouds: a single figure above what hides the ground, beside this degree's two figures looking past the dark from below.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Virgo 9°00′ up to, but not including, Virgo 10°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Virgo 9°51′ reads Virgo 10, and so does one at Virgo 9°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Virgo 11 after Virgo 9°59′, or back into Virgo 9 before Virgo 9°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 10 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Virgo 9, Virgo 11 and Pisces 10 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 9 and Virgo 11, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Pisces 10, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Virgo 9°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Virgo 10; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Virgo 9. 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: Two minds together look beyond what obscures the view.
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 9: Drawing the future the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Virgo 11: Moulded by expectation the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Pisces 10: Above the everyday the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Virgo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
