A son formed by his mother's hopes for him

The image

The picture is a relationship more than a moment. There is a mother, and there is her son, and between them are her hopes: what she wants him to be, to do, to become. The line says he is shaped by them, but it does not say whether the shaping is gentle or heavy, welcome or resented, and it gives no age, no home and no outcome. It is a portrait of influence, the way one person's wishes can work like a mould.

Meaning

The tradition reads its images as symbols, and this one stands for a life formed partly by someone else's picture of it. Our keyword is Moulded by expectation, and our keynote says that a life is formed by what another wanted it to be. The image is neither praise nor blame of the mother. Hopes can give a child confidence and direction; they can also leave him living a plan that was never his. One way to read a placement in this degree is as a strong awareness of other people's expectations, and of how they have shaped one's choices, with the work, sometimes lifelong, of telling one's own hopes apart from the ones received. It can be read from the mother's side too, as the power and the burden of hoping for someone else.

Lynda Hill's practice looks backward one degree for the ground of a placement and forward one for its aim. Behind this degree lies Virgo 10, two heads peering out past the darkness, two minds looking together; ahead lies Virgo 12, someone pulling the veil off a bride. By her rule the shared gaze of two people becomes the strong bond of mother and son, and the shaping done in private gives way to a sudden public unveiling. As a reading aid, the opposite degree, Pisces 11, shows men searching for enlightenment, people setting out to find their own answer, beside this degree's son living out an answer that someone else found for him.

In a chart

A planet or point anywhere from Virgo 10°00′ up to, but not including, Virgo 11°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Virgo 10°28′ reads Virgo 11, and so does one at Virgo 10°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Virgo 12 after Virgo 10°59′, or back into Virgo 10 before Virgo 10°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 11 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Virgo 10, Virgo 12 and Pisces 11 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 10 and Virgo 12, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced

Degree opposite

Pisces 11, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction

A position at Virgo 10°00′00″

Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Virgo 11; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Virgo 10. 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: A life is formed by what another wanted it to be.

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 10: Seeing past doubt the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
• Virgo 12: Unveiling the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
• Pisces 11: Shared quest the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
• Virgo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to