The image
One person stands in front of many and keeps them laughing. The image gives no stage, no jokes and no names; it gives only the relation between the two sides, the comedian who works and the crowd that responds, and the sound that joins them. Laughter here is not private amusement but something that passes back and forth, the performer feeding it and the audience returning it.
Meaning
Read as a symbol, the image is about the first meeting between a self and other people. A comedian sees what is absurd in ordinary life and shows it back, and the crowd recognises itself and laughs; for a moment the gap between one and many closes. Our keyword is Shared laughter, and our keynote reads it in one line: a performer and an audience meet in amusement. In a chart the tradition would look at such a placement as a place where a person meets others through humour or performance, and where being seen by a group matters as much as what is said. The picture asks nothing more of the reader than that recognition.
By Lynda Hill's practice of reading the neighbours, the degree before, Aries 1, is the background she calls the Karmic Condition: the woman held by a seal, life just come out of the sea. The degree after, Aries 3, her Quest Degree, is a cameo portrait whose face takes the outline of a man's country. So the laughter grows out of a first raw contact and leads toward a sense of where one belongs. Across the circle, Libra 2 can be read beside it as a reading aid: a light handed on from one race of people to the next, a serious transmission where this degree is a playful one.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Aries 1°00′ up to, but not including, Aries 2°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Aries 1°25′ reads Aries 2, and so does one at Aries 1°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Aries 3 after Aries 1°59′, or back into Aries 1 before Aries 1°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 2 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Aries 1, Aries 3 and Libra 2 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 1 and Aries 3, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Libra 2, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Aries 1°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Aries 2; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Aries 1. 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 performer and an audience meet in amusement.
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 1: Emergence; first consciousness the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Aries 3: Identity and homeland the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Libra 2: Passing the light on the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Aries in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
