The image
A figure stands or kneels before a fire, and the posture is one of reverence. The flame may be a hearth, an altar fire or a great blaze; the image keeps the attention on the worshipper's devotion and on the fire itself, light and heat that changes everything it touches.
The picture is described here as an image of devotion.
Meaning
Our keyword is "Devotion to the source" and our keynote: contemplation fixes on the power behind all forms. Both are ours.
Fire is the element that transforms: it warms, lights, cooks, refines and consumes. A person who worships it is honouring change itself, or the energy that makes change possible. We read the degree as attention directed past appearances toward what drives them. One way to see it is in a single-minded devotion to a cause, a craft or an idea that feels more real than the forms it takes. The image can also be read as the danger of any such fixed gaze, that what is worshipped becomes more important than the people around it. The tradition reads a picture like this for its shape, not for an outcome, and leaves its weight to the person.
For Lynda Hill, the picture just before shows what a placement inherits and the picture just after what it seeks. Before it is Capricorn 12, a naturalist giving a talk, knowledge of nature made public; here the knowing deepens into reverence. After it comes Capricorn 14, old granite carved in low relief, where devotion is cut into stone to last.
As a reading aid, the opposite degree is Cancer 13, a hand bent slightly with the thumb standing out strongly. The fire worshipper looks toward a power outside the self; the hand is character made visible in the body itself, and the two can be read as source and expression.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Capricorn 12°00′ up to, but not including, Capricorn 13°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Capricorn 12°42′ reads Capricorn 13, and so does one at Capricorn 12°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Capricorn 14 after Capricorn 12°59′, or back into Capricorn 12 before Capricorn 12°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 13 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Capricorn 12, Capricorn 14 and Cancer 13 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 12 and Capricorn 14, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Cancer 13, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Capricorn 12°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Capricorn 13; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Capricorn 12. 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: Contemplation fixes on the power behind all forms.
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 12: Knowledge made visible the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Capricorn 14: Carved in stone the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Cancer 13: Character made visible the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Capricorn in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
