The image
The picture is set inside a home. Birds, perhaps in cages, perhaps simply in the room, are singing, and their song fills the house. Nothing dramatic happens; the image is of warmth, shelter and a sound of contentment.
It is one of the plainest pictures in the set: an ordinary room, made glad by the birds that live in it, as Elsie Wheeler described it to Marc Edmund Jones in 1925.
Meaning
Our keyword is "Domestic joy" and our keynote: simple life, sheltered and warmed, breaks into song. Both are ours.
After the gravity of the degrees around it, this image is a relief. We read it as happiness that needs no occasion, the gladness that comes when the basics are secure: warmth, food, a roof. One way to see the degree is in the people who make a house feel lived in, or in the moments when the routine of a day turns, briefly, into something worth singing about. The picture can also be read as a question about walls: birds kept indoors are safe, and the image does not say whether they would choose it. The tradition reads such pictures as descriptions of a quality, and leaves the person to recognise where it shows in their own life.
Where this image comes from and where it is bound can be read, after Lynda Hill, in the pictures on either side of it. Before it comes Capricorn 7, the powerful figure with a veiled face; the move from that hidden authority to open song is a move from distance to intimacy. After it comes Capricorn 9, an angel holding a harp, where music from inside a home becomes music from above.
The opposite degree, Cancer 8, a parade of rabbits dressed in clothes, can be read beside it as a reading aid. Both images are light and domestic; the rabbits play at a dignity that is borrowed, while the birds sing without pretending to be anything but birds.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Capricorn 7°00′ up to, but not including, Capricorn 8°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Capricorn 7°37′ reads Capricorn 8, and so does one at Capricorn 7°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Capricorn 9 after Capricorn 7°59′, or back into Capricorn 7 before Capricorn 7°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 8 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Capricorn 7, Capricorn 9 and Cancer 8 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 7 and Capricorn 9, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Cancer 8, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Capricorn 7°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Capricorn 8; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Capricorn 7. 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: Simple life, sheltered and warmed, breaks into song.
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 7: Veiled authority the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Capricorn 9: Harmony from above the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Cancer 8: Playing at dignity the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Capricorn in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
