The image
The picture is a flying carpet, the old storyteller's device that carries its rider through the air. No rider or destination is named; the carpet itself, an everyday object off the floor and aloft, is the subject. A carpet belongs to the home, underfoot, so the image turns the most ordinary thing in a room into a means of travel.
Meaning
As a symbol, the magic carpet is imagination at work. It does not change the ground below; it changes where one stands to see it, and from a height the shape of things becomes clearer. Our keyword is Imagination that travels, and our keynote reads it in one sentence: the mind can rise above circumstance and survey it from a height. One way to recognise the image in a chart is a placement where fantasy, vision or a wide overview helps a person through, or where it tempts them to stay aloft rather than land. The tradition reads it as a picture of perspective, not of escape, though it can be both.
After Lynda Hill, the degree before a placement is its Karmic Condition and the degree after its Quest Degree. Aries 18, before this one, is the empty hammock; Aries 20, after it, is a little girl putting out food for birds in winter. By that rule an untaken rest becomes a flight of the mind, which comes down again to a small act of care in a hard season. Opposite is Libra 19, thieves lying low in a hideout, a concealed and earthbound scene; as a reading aid it sets hiding below beside soaring above.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Aries 18°00′ up to, but not including, Aries 19°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Aries 18°54′ reads Aries 19, and so does one at Aries 18°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Aries 20 after Aries 18°59′, or back into Aries 18 before Aries 18°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 Aries 19 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Aries 18, Aries 20 and Libra 19 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
- Aries 18 and Aries 20, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Libra 19, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Aries 18°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Aries 19; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Aries 18. 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 mind can rise above circumstance and survey it from a height.
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
- Aries 18: Rest not taken the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Aries 20: Care in hard seasons the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Libra 19: Concealed threat the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Aries in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
