A bald man, bare-headed and unadorned

The image

A bald head shines under the light, and the line says nothing else: no age, no expression, no clothes, no setting. Without hair, a head looks barer and harder, the shape of the skull plain, nothing softening the face. Many cultures have read baldness in contrary ways, as age, as strength or as renunciation, from monks who shave their heads to wrestlers and generals photographed in profile. The image keeps the bareness and leaves the meaning open.

Meaning

Read in the tradition's way, as a symbol, the bare head stands for force that does without decoration. Our keyword is Bare determination, and our keynote says that dominance is taken openly, without ornament. After a degree of fine manners, this one strips everything away. One way to read a placement here is as a directness that does not dress up its aims, a plain, strong presence that others notice at once, and as the question of how such force is used: openly asserted power can protect or can push others aside. The image can also stand for honesty, the face shown as it is, without anything added.

Lynda Hill pairs every degree with the two beside it, reading backward for background and forward for heading. Backward lies Virgo 27, ladies of high society taking tea, form and polish; forward lies Virgo 29, a man reading a paper and learning hidden things. By her rule the cultivated manners of the tea table give way to a bare, unadorned figure, and that plain force gives way to a quieter kind of strength, the patient reading that finds what lies under the surface. As a reading aid, the opposite degree, Pisces 28, shows a garden in full growth with the moon full above it: lush, abundant growth, beside this degree's single bare head.

In a chart

A planet or point anywhere from Virgo 27°00′ up to, but not including, Virgo 28°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Virgo 27°57′ reads Virgo 28, and so does one at Virgo 27°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Virgo 29 after Virgo 27°59′, or back into Virgo 27 before Virgo 27°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 28 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Virgo 27, Virgo 29 and Pisces 28 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 27 and Virgo 29, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced

Degree opposite

Pisces 28, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction

A position at Virgo 27°00′00″

Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Virgo 28; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Virgo 27. 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: Dominance is taken openly, without ornament.

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 27: Cultivated manners the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
• Virgo 29: Hidden knowledge the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
• Pisces 28: Ripeness the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
• Virgo in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to