The image
This image shows no figure and no place. What it describes is something that happens inside a person: a chance went by, and afterwards the mind goes back to it, turns it over and lives it in another form. The picture holds both the loss and the return. In 1925 the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler saw this picture for an unseen card, the one marked Aries 27.
Meaning
The tradition reads the image as the power of imagination over circumstance. What could not happen in the world can still be explored in thought, rehearsed and understood, and sometimes that understanding is worth more than the chance itself. Our keyword is Won back in the mind, and our keynote reads it in one sentence: what circumstance took away the mind can win back in another form. In a chart a placement here could be read as a place where reflection, memory or creative work turns a disappointment into something usable. The image does not deny the loss; it shows a way of living with it.
Lynda Hill calls the degree before the Karmic Condition and the degree after the Quest Degree. Before Aries 27 is Aries 26, the man whose gifts spill from his hands; after it is Aries 28, a big crowd of spectators who are let down. Read by her rule, what fell from full hands is recovered in the mind, and the next image turns from one person's loss to the disappointment of many. The degree opposite is Libra 27, an aeroplane holding still high overhead; as a reading aid it sets a view from above beside this degree's view from within.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Aries 26°00′ up to, but not including, Aries 27°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Aries 26°50′ reads Aries 27, and so does one at Aries 26°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Aries 28 after Aries 26°59′, or back into Aries 26 before Aries 26°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 27 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Aries 26, Aries 28 and Libra 27 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 26 and Aries 28, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Libra 27, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Aries 26°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Aries 27; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Aries 26. 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 circumstance took away the mind can win back in another form.
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 26: Overflowing talent the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Aries 28: Expectation unmet the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Libra 27: Elevated perspective the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Aries in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
