The image
A sprite, a small spirit of folklore, moves in or above the water: in a stream, a fountain or the spray of a fall. The picture gives it no story, only its presence, quick and bright, the kind of figure people have long imagined in places where water moves and sparkles.
The image is read on this page as a figure of imagination.
Meaning
Our keyword is "Water spirit" and our keynote: the playful life of water is pictured as a small being.
People have long given moving water a personality: the brook that chatters, the spring that is a living thing. We read the degree as that habit of the imagination, which finds life and play in the natural world and gives it a face. In a sign associated with stone and structure, the sprite brings lightness, mischief and change. One way to see the image is in a person whose seriousness is crossed by a quick, irreverent humour, or in moments when imagination interrupts a sober routine. The image can also be read as elusiveness, since a sprite cannot be held. The tradition takes the picture as a description and leaves the reader to recognise where it fits.
Hill sets a placement's image in the company of its neighbours, reading the earlier as cause of the mood and the later as its purpose. Before it is Capricorn 25, the dealer in hand-knotted rugs, a world of fixed patterns and value; here everything moves. After it comes Capricorn 27, a pilgrimage up a mountain, where the play of water gives way to the slow climb of devotion.
The opposite degree, Cancer 26, people reading at ease on sofas in a comfortable home, can be read beside this one as a reading aid. The readers enjoy imagination indoors and at rest; the sprite is imagination outdoors and in motion, and the pair contrasts cultivated leisure with wild play.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Capricorn 25°00′ up to, but not including, Capricorn 26°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Capricorn 25°43′ reads Capricorn 26, and so does one at Capricorn 25°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Capricorn 27 after Capricorn 25°59′, or back into Capricorn 25 before Capricorn 25°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 26 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Capricorn 25, Capricorn 27 and Cancer 26 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 25 and Capricorn 27, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Cancer 26, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Capricorn 25°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Capricorn 26; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Capricorn 25. 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: The playful life of water is pictured as a small being.
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 25: Accumulated craft the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Capricorn 27: Arduous devotion the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Cancer 26: Cultivated leisure the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Capricorn in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
