A family tree drawn out across the page

The image

The picture is a family tree. On paper or parchment, names are set out in rows, each generation below the one before, joined by lines of marriage and descent, the oldest names at the top and the living at the bottom, or the other way round. The line gives no family and no country. Such charts take long work to make, from parish books, letters and memory, and they are never quite complete; the oldest branches fade into blanks.

Meaning

Read as a symbol, which is how the tradition reads every degree image, the family tree is about a single life seen as part of a long line. Our keyword is Lineage, and our keynote says that one life is a branch of a long descent. The chart puts every person in relation to many others they never met. One way to read a placement in this degree is as a strong feeling for roots, an interest in where one comes from and in the stories and patterns that run through a family, and as a sense of belonging to something longer than one lifetime. It can also be read for the blanks: every tree has missing names, and part of the work is accepting what cannot be found.

Lynda Hill reads the family tree between its neighbours, one degree back for ground and one degree on for aim. Behind this one lies Virgo 13, political frenzy calmed by a firm hand, the noise of the present brought to order; ahead lies Virgo 15, a handkerchief made for show. By her rule the steadied crowd gives way to the quiet record of descent, and the record gives way to a delicate object that a family might hand down from one generation to the next. As a reading aid, the opposite degree, Pisces 14, shows a woman wearing a fox fur, whose keyword is Luxurious protection: an outward show of warmth and status, beside this degree's inward record of where one belongs.

In a chart

A planet or point anywhere from Virgo 13°00′ up to, but not including, Virgo 14°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Virgo 13°19′ reads Virgo 14, and so does one at Virgo 13°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Virgo 15 after Virgo 13°59′, or back into Virgo 13 before Virgo 13°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 14 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Virgo 13, Virgo 15 and Pisces 14 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 13 and Virgo 15, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced

Degree opposite

Pisces 14, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction

A position at Virgo 13°00′00″

Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Virgo 14; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Virgo 13. 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: One life is a branch of a long descent.

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 13: Firm control the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
• Virgo 15: Refined heirloom the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
• Pisces 14: Luxurious protection the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
• Virgo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to