The image
A clear or heavy day, and then without warning the storm: thunder, lightning, a sudden downpour. People caught out run for cover. Then, as storms do, it passes, and the air afterwards is cooler and cleaner than it was. The picture holds both the shock and the clearing.
It is read here as weather in a picture, not as a warning of anything.
Meaning
Our keyword is "Sudden clearing" and our keynote: what was not foreseen breaks the air and refreshes it.
The storm is unexpected, but the image does not treat it as a disaster. We read the degree as the kind of disruption that releases a tension that had been building, so that afterwards things feel lighter. One way to see it is in a conversation that finally happens, a change of plan forced by circumstances, or an idea that arrives out of nowhere and rearranges everything. The image can also be read for its unsettling side, since no one chooses the moment of the storm. Readers of the Sabian symbols treat the picture as a description of a quality.
Lynda Hill would have the reader look either side, to the degree that leads in and the degree that leads on. The degree before is Aquarius 1, an old mission church of mud brick, long settled and enduring; here the settled air is broken open. The degree after is Aquarius 3, a sailor who has deserted, where the sudden change in the weather becomes a sudden change of allegiance.
The opposite degree, Leo 2, pictures mumps sweeping through a community, an image read on its own page only as a picture of something shared by many, with our keyword of shared affliction. As a reading aid it sits beside the storm: both pass through a whole place at once, one leaving the air cleared.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Aquarius 1°00′ up to, but not including, Aquarius 2°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Aquarius 1°25′ reads Aquarius 2, and so does one at Aquarius 1°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Aquarius 3 after Aquarius 1°59′, or back into Aquarius 1 before Aquarius 1°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 2 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Aquarius 1, Aquarius 3 and Leo 2 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
- Aquarius 1 and Aquarius 3, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Leo 2, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Aquarius 1°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Aquarius 2; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Aquarius 1. 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: What was not foreseen breaks the air and refreshes it.
Claims about it
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
- Aquarius 1: Enduring foundation the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Aquarius 3: Breaking rank the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Leo 2: Shared affliction the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Aquarius in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
