The image
A shield divided into fields of colour carries lions, eagles, lilies or towers, and around it the full apparatus of heraldry: a crown above, supporters on either side, a motto on a ribbon below. The line names only the arms and the royal house; it does not say which. Heraldry is a strict visual language with its own rules and vocabulary, and a royal achievement of arms is its grandest sentence, a family's claim to rank set out in colours anyone trained can read.
Meaning
Read as a symbol, the coat of arms stands for identity worn as a formal sign, which is how the tradition would take it, not as a fact about any reader. Our keyword is Inherited status, and our keynote says that identity and rank are displayed in formal symbols. The arms are not the family; they stand for it, and they outlast every member. One way to read a placement in this degree is as a strong feeling for belonging, title and tradition, and for the signs that show who one is to a world of strangers, together with the weight such signs can carry. The image also raises the old question of what a badge means when the person wearing it has done nothing yet to earn it.
In Lynda Hill's reading, a degree grows out of the one before it and moves toward the one after. Before this one stands Virgo 21, young women playing basketball as a team, a group whose colours were won in play; after it stands Virgo 23, a man who trains animals. By her rule the team's chosen colours give way to colours inherited by birth, and inherited rank gives way to a figure whose authority comes only from nerve and practice. As a reading aid, the opposite degree is Pisces 22, a man carrying the new law down the mountain of Sinai: a code handed down from above for a whole people, beside this degree's emblem of a single house.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Virgo 21°00′ up to, but not including, Virgo 22°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Virgo 21°15′ reads Virgo 22, and so does one at Virgo 21°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Virgo 23 after Virgo 21°59′, or back into Virgo 21 before Virgo 21°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 22 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Virgo 21, Virgo 23 and Pisces 22 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 21 and Virgo 23, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Pisces 22, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Virgo 21°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Virgo 22; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Virgo 21. 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: Identity and rank are displayed in formal symbols.
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.
Elsewhere on EsoTerrier
- Virgo 21: Cooperative play the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Virgo 23: Mastering force the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Pisces 22: Revelation carried down the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Virgo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
