The image
Most Sabian images are things seen: a ship, a bird, a person at work. This one is closer to a description of an inner state. The picture is of a soul open on every side, receptive, waiting for what helps it develop, as if the door of a house had been left wide on purpose.
Marc Edmund Jones, who recorded the picture from the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler, said he saw an order in the whole set only once it was complete.
Meaning
Our keyword is "Open spirit", and our keynote: inner life is ready to take in what helps it develop.
An image without a picture invites the reader to supply one. We read the degree as the state of a learner before the first lesson, when nothing has yet been decided and everything offered can still be weighed. Openness here is not passivity. It is a choice to stay teachable, which takes some courage in a sign so often associated with structure and rank. The image can also be read as a caution against openness without discrimination, taking in everything because nothing has been chosen. Readers in the tradition leave that balance to the rest of the chart and to the person, since the image describes and does not decide.
Lynda Hill gives every degree a past and a direction, which she calls the Karmic Condition and the Quest Degree. Here the degree before is Capricorn 2, the stained-glass windows, one damaged, so the openness can be read as what follows a test survived. The degree after is Capricorn 4, a group climbing into a big canoe, where the open soul finds company and a shared journey.
The opposite degree, Cancer 3, offers a reading aid: a man in furs leading a deer with a shaggy coat. That picture is about guiding what is still half wild; this one is about being ready to be guided, and the two can be held side by side.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Capricorn 2°00′ up to, but not including, Capricorn 3°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Capricorn 2°32′ reads Capricorn 3, and so does one at Capricorn 2°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Capricorn 4 after Capricorn 2°59′, or back into Capricorn 2 before Capricorn 2°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 Capricorn 3 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Capricorn 2, Capricorn 4 and Cancer 3 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
- Capricorn 2 and Capricorn 4, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Cancer 3, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Capricorn 2°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Capricorn 3; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Capricorn 2. 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: Inner life is ready to take in what helps it develop.
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
- Capricorn 2: Faith wounded, faith standing the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Capricorn 4: Preparation for a shared voyage the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Cancer 3: Guiding the half-wild the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Capricorn in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
