Young women at basketball, passing the ball between them

The image

Five players in gym clothes move up a wooden floor, passing, cutting, calling to each other, and the ball goes from hand to hand toward the hoop. The line says only that they are young women and that they play as a team. In 1925 women's basketball was a common school and college sport in America, often played under rules meant to keep players in zones, so passing mattered more than running with the ball. Whoever scores, the basket belongs to all five.

Meaning

The tradition treats a picture like this as a symbol. Our keyword is Cooperative play, and our keynote says that individuals learn to move as one for a shared goal. What makes a team is not five good players but five players who read each other. The pass is the key gesture of the image: giving the ball away so that someone better placed can use it. One way to see a placement here is as a talent for working in a group, a pleasure in shared effort and an instinct for when to hold on and when to pass, and as a sense that play is a serious way of learning to trust others.

Lynda Hill's practice is to read the degree just before as background and the degree just after as aim. Here the background is Virgo 20, a long line of motor cars travelling together, many people heading the same way; the aim is Virgo 22, the heraldic arms of a royal house. By her rule the convoy of strangers becomes a team that plays as one, and the team's colours give way, in the next degree, to the far older colours and emblems of a dynasty. The opposite degree, Pisces 21, offered as a reading aid, shows a child holding a small white lamb, with someone close by; its keyword is Tender company. There the closeness is quiet and protective; here it is fast, loud and shared on a basketball floor.

In a chart

A planet or point anywhere from Virgo 20°00′ up to, but not including, Virgo 21°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Virgo 20°38′ reads Virgo 21, and so does one at Virgo 20°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Virgo 22 after Virgo 20°59′, or back into Virgo 20 before Virgo 20°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 21 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Virgo 20, Virgo 22 and Pisces 21 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 20 and Virgo 22, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced

Degree opposite

Pisces 21, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction

A position at Virgo 20°00′00″

Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Virgo 21; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Virgo 20. 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: Individuals learn to act as one for a shared goal.

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 20: Collective migration the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
• Virgo 22: Inherited status the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
• Pisces 21: Tender company the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
• Virgo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to