The image
The picture is a crowd at boiling point, and a figure who steadies it. People are caught up in political excitement, shouting, surging, past the point of listening, and someone with a firm hand brings them back to order. The line does not name the cause, the country or the person, and it does not say whether the steadying is by force, by presence or by words. It gives the contrast between heat and steadiness.
Meaning
The tradition reads degree images as symbols, and this one stands for self-command meeting a loss of it, whether in a crowd or in one mind. Our keyword is Firm control, and our keynote says that authority steadies a crowd that has lost its reason. The image can be read inwardly as easily as outwardly. A mind in a frenzy of opinion is a crowd too, and the firm hand can be one's own judgement. One way to read a placement in this degree is as an ability to stay level when others are carried away and to bring calm to a heated room, and as the care such authority needs, since a firm hand that calms can also silence, and the picture shows only the first.
Lynda Hill reads the degree before a placement as its background, the Karmic Condition in her terms, and the degree after as its direction, her Quest Degree. Before this one comes Virgo 12, someone pulling the veil off a bride, a sudden exposure; after it comes Virgo 14, a chart of a family's ancestry. By her rule the shock of an unveiling becomes a crowd's frenzy, the frenzy is steadied, and once the noise is over the next degree turns to the long, quiet record of where a family came from. As a reading aid, the opposite degree, Pisces 13, shows a sword displayed as a museum piece: power that is now retired and only looked at, beside this degree's power used in the moment to bring order.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Virgo 12°00′ up to, but not including, Virgo 13°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Virgo 12°42′ reads Virgo 13, and so does one at Virgo 12°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Virgo 14 after Virgo 12°59′, or back into Virgo 12 before Virgo 12°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 13 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Virgo 12, Virgo 14 and Pisces 13 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 12 and Virgo 14, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Pisces 13, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Virgo 12°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Virgo 13; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Virgo 12. 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: Authority steadies a crowd that has lost its reason.
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.
