The image
The picture is the earth breaking open. A volcano is in eruption, throwing fire, ash and smoke into the sky, with molten rock perhaps running down its sides. The line gives no town nearby and no watchers. What it shows is pressure from deep below that has found a way out, after a long time of building up out of sight. The mountain itself is made of what earlier eruptions left behind.
Meaning
The tradition reads degree images as symbols, and the volcano is read for what it stands for, deep pressure breaking through, never as a picture of danger to anyone. Our keyword is Explosive release, and our keynote says that what was pent up deep down breaks violently to the surface. The image comes in the middle of Virgo, a sign usually linked with care and order, and it shows what such care can sit on top of. One way to read a placement in this degree is as strong feeling held under a calm surface, and as the energy that comes when it is let out, sometimes in creative force, sometimes in temper. It also carries a plain fact about volcanoes: their ash makes some of the most fertile soil there is, so what breaks out can later feed new growth.
Read with Lynda Hill's rule, the volcano has a background in the degree before and a heading in the degree after. Behind this degree is Virgo 16, an orangutan, the great red ape, our animal kin; ahead is Virgo 18, a talking board on the table. By her rule the meeting with the primal goes down into the earth's own force, and after the eruption the next degree turns to people at a table, quietly reaching for what lies hidden. As a reading aid, the opposite degree, Pisces 17, shows strollers in their Easter finery: renewal shown off gently in spring clothes, beside this degree's renewal of the ground by fire.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Virgo 16°00′ up to, but not including, Virgo 17°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Virgo 16°10′ reads Virgo 17, and so does one at Virgo 16°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Virgo 18 after Virgo 16°59′, or back into Virgo 16 before Virgo 16°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 17 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Virgo 16, Virgo 18 and Pisces 17 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 16 and Virgo 18, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Pisces 17, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Virgo 16°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Virgo 17; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Virgo 16. 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: What was pent up deep down breaks violently to the surface.
Claims about it
-
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.
-
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.
-
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 16: Meeting the primal the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Virgo 18: Reaching for hidden guidance the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Pisces 17: Renewal displayed the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Virgo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
