The image
The image is a gate, and beyond it a garden filled with whatever is most desired. The picture stays at the entrance: the gate may be shut or ajar, and no one is shown walking through. A garden is a cultivated place, tended and enclosed, and its gate both invites and separates. Jones took the picture down in San Diego in 1925 from Elsie Wheeler's description of the card for Aries 22.
Meaning
Read as a symbol, the gate is the point between wanting and having. The garden is full and close, but it has to be entered, and entering means opening the gate and walking in, which is a different thing from looking. Our keyword is At the garden gate, and our keynote reads it in one line: what is longed for lies beyond a gate that still has to be opened. In a chart a placement here can be read as a place of strong desire and anticipation, where a person stands at the edge of something hoped for. The picture does not say the gate opens easily, or at all; it shows the threshold and the longing that brings someone to it.
Lynda Hill calls the degree before its Karmic Condition and the degree after its Quest Degree. Here they are Aries 21, the boxer stepping into the ring, and Aries 23, a woman in pale colours carrying a heavy, precious, veiled burden. So the gate comes after a contest and before a burden: what is won or wished for has to be carried. Opposite is Libra 22, a child at a fountain letting the birds drink; as a reading aid it sets a small, open-handed gift beside this degree's longing for a garden that is not yet entered.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Aries 21°00′ up to, but not including, Aries 22°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Aries 21°45′ reads Aries 22, and so does one at Aries 21°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Aries 23 after Aries 21°59′, or back into Aries 21 before Aries 21°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 22 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Aries 21, Aries 23 and Libra 22 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 21 and Aries 23, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Libra 22, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Aries 21°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Aries 22; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Aries 21. 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: What is longed for lies beyond a gate that still has to be opened.
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 21: Readiness to contend the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Aries 23: Hidden burden the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Libra 22: Simple kindness the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Aries in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
