The image
A large cage or aviary, filled with birds of many kinds: different colours, sizes and songs, perching, flying short distances, calling to one another. The bars are as much a part of the picture as the birds; everything that flies here flies within them.
The cage is large, but it is still a cage. Jones took the picture down in San Diego in 1925 from Elsie Wheeler's description of the card for Capricorn 28.
Meaning
Our keyword is "Contained variety" and our keynote: many kinds of winged life are kept together, within limits.
The aviary gathers what would be scattered across many skies. We read the degree as the ability to hold a great variety of things, people or ideas within one frame, as a city, a school or a mind does. One way to see it is in a person who keeps many interests and loyalties alive at once, organised so that they can coexist. The image can also be read for its cost: the birds are safe and visible, but none of them is free, and the question of where structure ends and confinement begins belongs to the picture. Readers in the Sabian tradition take it as a description and leave its emphasis to the rest of the chart.
Under Lynda Hill's rule, the preceding degree is the ground underfoot and the following one the horizon. The degree before is Capricorn 27, a pilgrimage up a mountain, devotion moving freely upward; here life is held in place. The degree after is Capricorn 29, a woman reading the leaves in a teacup, where the crowded variety of the cage narrows to a few small shapes at the bottom of a cup.
The opposite degree, Cancer 28, Pocahontas in our own time, can be read beside it as a reading aid. Pocahontas is remembered as a person who moved between two worlds; the caged birds are many worlds brought into one place, and the two images hold bridging beside containing.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Capricorn 27°00′ up to, but not including, Capricorn 28°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Capricorn 27°57′ reads Capricorn 28, and so does one at Capricorn 27°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Capricorn 29 after Capricorn 27°59′, or back into Capricorn 27 before Capricorn 27°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 28 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Capricorn 27, Capricorn 29 and Cancer 28 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 27 and Capricorn 29, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Cancer 28, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Capricorn 27°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Capricorn 28; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Capricorn 27. 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: Many kinds of winged life are kept together, within limits.
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 27: Arduous devotion the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Capricorn 29: Reading small signs the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Cancer 28: Bridging worlds the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Capricorn in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
