The image
The picture is a boxer entering the ring: through the ropes, onto the canvas, under the lights. The fight has not started, and the image says nothing of the opponent or the result. Everything in it is about the threshold, the step from training into the contest, where strength has to be shown under rules and in front of others.
Meaning
As a symbol the boxer stands for willingness to be tested. A ring is a bounded space with rules, and stepping into it means accepting a contest on its own terms, without claiming victory in advance. Our keyword is Readiness to contend, and our keynote puts it in one sentence: strength is proved by stepping forward to meet a test on its own terms. In a chart the tradition would read a placement here as a place where a person rises to challenges, enjoys a fair fight, or has to learn when a contest is worth entering. The picture stops at the ropes, and so do we: it shows the step, not the outcome.
Lynda Hill reads the degree before as the Karmic Condition and the degree after as the Quest Degree. Before Aries 21 is Aries 20, a little girl putting out food for the birds in winter; after it is Aries 22, a gate that opens on a garden of longing. Read by her rule, gentle care in a hard season comes before a show of strength, and the strength leads on to a gate and to what lies behind it. Across the circle, Libra 21 shows crowds of people out on the sand, a beach full of ease; as a reading aid it sets mass relaxation beside one person's chosen trial.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Aries 20°00′ up to, but not including, Aries 21°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Aries 20°08′ reads Aries 21, and so does one at Aries 20°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Aries 22 after Aries 20°59′, or back into Aries 20 before Aries 20°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 21 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Aries 20, Aries 22 and Libra 21 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 20 and Aries 22, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Libra 21, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Aries 20°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Aries 21; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Aries 20. 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: Strength is proved by stepping forward to meet a test on its own terms.
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 20: Care in hard seasons the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Aries 22: At the garden gate the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Libra 21: Mass relaxation the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Aries in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
