A flag lowered to half-mast

The image

On a tall pole outside a town hall, a school or a ship, a flag that usually flies at the top has been brought down to the middle and left there. Everyone who passes understands the signal without being told: someone, or something, is being mourned. The line gives no name and no reason. A half-mast flag is a quiet public gesture; it stops nothing, but it changes how the whole place looks for a day or a week.

Meaning

Read as a symbol, which is what the tradition does with each degree, the lowered flag stands for a community marking a loss together. Our keyword is Public mourning, and our keynote says that a community pauses to honour a loss. The picture is about honour and pause, not about the loss itself. One way to read a placement in this degree is as a feeling for shared rituals of respect, the instinct to mark what matters to a group and to give grief a visible, dignified form, and as the strength of communities that know how to stop together. It can also be read as the plain kindness of noticing when others are grieving, and lowering one's own flag a little.

Following Lynda Hill, look back one degree for the background and forward one for the direction. Back one degree is Virgo 24, a white lamb trailing after Mary, simple affection; forward one is Virgo 26, a boy swinging incense in a censer. By her rule tender, private loyalty gives way to a whole community's public respect, and the lowered flag leads on to a young helper learning the gestures of a rite, mourning followed by service. The opposite degree, Pisces 25, read beside it as an aid, shows priests purged from their own order: an institution cleansing itself by removal, beside an institution here that honours by lowering its sign.

In a chart

A planet or point anywhere from Virgo 24°00′ up to, but not including, Virgo 25°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Virgo 24°06′ reads Virgo 25, and so does one at Virgo 24°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Virgo 26 after Virgo 24°59′, or back into Virgo 24 before Virgo 24°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 25 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Virgo 24, Virgo 26 and Pisces 25 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 24 and Virgo 26, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced

Degree opposite

Pisces 25, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction

A position at Virgo 24°00′00″

Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Virgo 25; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Virgo 24. 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: A community pauses to honour a loss.

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 24: Innocent devotion the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
• Virgo 26: Apprenticed service the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
• Pisces 25: Cleansing the priesthood the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
• Virgo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to