The image
A small church of adobe, earth and straw dried in the sun, stands where it was built generations ago. Its walls are thick and its lines simple; it was made by hand from the ground it stands on. Age shows in the softened corners, but the building is still there and still in use.
The church is read here as an image of foundation and endurance.
Meaning
Our keyword is "Enduring foundation", and our keynote: a simple structure built for faith outlasts its age. Both are ours.
A sign so often linked with the new opens on something old. We read the degree as a reminder that lasting change rests on foundations laid with humble materials and steady purpose. The mud brick is not grand, but it was made to serve a community, and it has. One way to see the image is in the plain, unglamorous work that holds a group together over time: a shared place, a shared practice, a building people keep repairing because it matters to them. The image can also be read as a question about what the old structure was built to do, and for whom. The tradition reads a degree's picture as descriptive and leaves those questions with the reader.
In the manner of Lynda Hill, the degree that comes first gives the setting and the degree that comes next gives the aim. Before it comes Capricorn 30, businessmen meeting behind a closed door, plans made privately among a few; here the building is open to everyone. After it comes Aquarius 2, a thunderstorm no one saw coming, where the settled old structure meets a sudden change in the air.
As a reading aid, the opposite degree is Leo 1, a man struck by apoplexy, read on its own page as an image only, with our keyword of overreach. Beside the patient mud-brick church, it pictures a force pushed too far too fast, and the two can be held as endurance and excess.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Aquarius 0°00′ up to, but not including, Aquarius 1°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Aquarius 0°48′ reads Aquarius 1, and so does one at Aquarius 0°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Aquarius 2 after Aquarius 0°59′, or back into Capricorn 30 before Aquarius 0°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 Aquarius 1 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Capricorn 30, Aquarius 2 and Leo 1 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 30 and Aquarius 2, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Leo 1, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Aquarius 0°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Aquarius 1; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Capricorn 30. 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: A simple structure built for faith outlasts its age.
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 30: Closed doors the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Aquarius 2: Sudden clearing the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Leo 1: Overreach the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Aquarius in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
