Relay runners handing the baton from one to the next

The image

A track, a team and a baton. One runner arrives at full speed, another is already moving to take the baton, and for a stride or two their hands meet. The picture lives in that handover, the instant when the race passes from one person to another without stopping.

Like the other 359, the image was described by the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler and written down by Marc Edmund Jones, by his account of the day.

Meaning

Our keyword is "Passing the baton", and our keynote: success depends on each one handing on to the next. Both are ours.

In a relay, no runner finishes the race alone, and the most dangerous moment is not the running but the exchange. We read the degree as the art of continuity: knowing when to give up what one carries, and how to give it so that the next person can go on at once. One way to see it is in teams, families and crafts where work is handed down, or in a person's own life when one stage ends and another takes its momentum. The image can also be read for what it asks of the receiver, who must be moving before the baton arrives. The tradition reads it as a picture of a quality and attaches no outcome to it.

Lynda Hill's two neighbours frame the image: behind it, a starting point; ahead of it, an aim. The degree before is Capricorn 20, a choir singing out of sight, many voices joined without names; here the many become a line of individuals, each with a turn. The degree after is Capricorn 22, a general who loses with good grace, where the contest ends and the question becomes how to meet the result.

As a reading aid, the opposite degree is Cancer 21, an opera diva in song. The relay shares the glory out among a team; the diva holds the stage alone, and the two pictures can be read as shared effort beside solo brilliance.

In a chart

A planet or point anywhere from Capricorn 20°00′ up to, but not including, Capricorn 21°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Capricorn 20°38′ reads Capricorn 21, and so does one at Capricorn 20°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Capricorn 22 after Capricorn 20°59′, or back into Capricorn 20 before Capricorn 20°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 21 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Capricorn 20, Capricorn 22 and Cancer 21 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 20 and Capricorn 22, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced

Degree opposite

Cancer 21, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction

A position at Capricorn 20°00′00″

Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Capricorn 21; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Capricorn 20. 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: Success depends on each one handing on to the next.

Claims about it

• The image line on this page, or on any site, is Elsie Wheeler's own wording.

  false

  What 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.

• Reading the degree before and the degree after is part of how the zodiac is built, or of Jones's method.

  false

  What the record shows: It is Lynda Hill's practice, and the two names are hers. We show the two degrees with her name.

• Dane Rudhyar's 1973 lines are the Sabian symbols and free to print.

  false

  What 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 20: Unseen voices the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
• Capricorn 22: Grace in defeat the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
• Cancer 21: Virtuoso self-expression the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
• Capricorn in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to