The image
The sun is at its height, the shutters are closed, the streets are empty, and someone is asleep in the shade. The picture is of a custom more than a person: the siesta, the pause in the hottest part of the day that many warm countries build into their routine. Nothing is happening, and that is the point of the image.
Elsie Wheeler described this degree's picture to Marc Edmund Jones in San Diego in 1925.
Meaning
The siesta can be read as a picture of good timing. Rest here is not laziness or retreat but a sensible answer to conditions: when the sun makes work wasteful, one stops, and the work resumes in the cooler hours. Our keyword is "Timely rest", and our keynote says effort pauses when conditions do not favour it. A placement here can be read as a feel for rhythm, a readiness to stop without guilt, and a sense that pushing on at the wrong hour achieves less than waiting. The image is unhurried and a little sleepy, and that mood is part of its meaning.
Read the way Lynda Hill reads a chart, Libra 14 looks back to a Karmic Condition and forward to a Quest Degree. Libra 13, children making soap bubbles for the delight of it, lies before this degree; Libra 15, paths that wind round and come back on themselves, lies after it. Read together, play gives way to a midday stillness, and the stillness to a walk that returns where it began.
The opposite degree is Aries 14, a snake coiled close beside a couple, our "Knowledge and temptation". Beside it as a reading aid, the noon rest offers a counterweight: where Aries 14 shows the moment awareness enters and changes everything, Libra 14 shows the moment when nothing needs to change at all.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Libra 13°00′ up to, but not including, Libra 14°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Libra 13°49′ reads Libra 14, and so does one at Libra 13°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Libra 15 after Libra 13°59′, or back into Libra 13 before Libra 13°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 14 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Libra 13, Libra 15 and Aries 14 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 13 and Libra 15, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Aries 14, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Libra 13°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Libra 14; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Libra 13. 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: Effort pauses when conditions do not favour it.
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 13: Fragile delight the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Libra 15: Recurrence the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Aries 14: Knowledge and temptation the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Libra in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
