The image
A wall in a gallery and three great paintings on it, each by an old master. It is the hanging that matters, the choice to set these three side by side where people can stand and look. Behind the image is a whole practice of keeping things: collecting, restoring, framing, lighting, and agreeing on what deserves a place on the wall.
Meaning
One way to read the gallery wall is as a picture of standards. Three works chosen and hung together tell the viewer what excellence has looked like, and invite comparison with what is being made now. Our keyword is "Treasured achievement", and our keynote says the finest work of the past is kept and honoured. A placement here can be read as respect for craft and for the long effort behind it, an eye for quality, and a wish to place one's own work in that company. The image can also be read more coolly: what is honoured on the wall is finished, and no longer changes.
In Lynda Hill's practice Libra 9 is read between two neighbours, the Karmic Condition behind it and the Quest Degree ahead. Before Libra 9 is Libra 8, the fire roaring in the hearth of an empty house; after it is Libra 10, a canoe working through rough water toward safety. The three pictures can be followed from warmth kept for no one, to work kept for everyone, to a single boat steered carefully through risk.
Opposite is Aries 9, a person gazing into a crystal ball, our "Focused inner vision". Read beside it as an aid, the inward look that seeks images beyond ordinary sight faces the outward look of a viewer before images that the past has already made.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Libra 8°00′ up to, but not including, Libra 9°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Libra 8°44′ reads Libra 9, and so does one at Libra 8°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Libra 10 after Libra 8°59′, or back into Libra 8 before Libra 8°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 Libra 9 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Libra 8, Libra 10 and Aries 9 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
- Libra 8 and Libra 10, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Aries 9, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Libra 8°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Libra 9; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Libra 8. 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: The finest work of the past is kept and honoured.
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
- Libra 8: Warmth kept for no one the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Libra 10: Through to safety the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Aries 9: Focused inner vision the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Libra in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
