The image
A human infant, not a chick, is pushing out through the shell of an egg. The image is deliberately strange: a bird's way of being born given to a person. The shell cracks; the child emerges complete. Nothing in the picture is harmed except the shell, which has done its work.
The image is read here as a symbol of emergence, as a dream image would be.
Meaning
Our keyword is "New kind of birth", and our keynote: life emerges whole from a form that has to be broken. Both are ours.
An egg is a perfect container until the moment it is not, and then it has to break. We read the degree as the experience of outgrowing a protective structure: a home, a training, a set of ideas that held a person safely while they formed. One way to see it is in a break with the familiar that feels like birth rather than loss. The strangeness of a child in an eggshell can also be read as newness that does not fit the usual categories, a beginning of an unfamiliar kind. The Sabian tradition takes such pictures as descriptions to recognise, and nothing in this one is read as an event in a life.
Lynda Hill's reading of neighbours makes the degree before a starting condition and the degree after a direction to follow. Before it comes Aquarius 6, a player in an old mystery drama, ritual that enacts rebirth; here the rebirth is pictured directly. After it comes Aquarius 8, waxwork figures in fine gowns, where living emergence is followed by perfect forms with no life in them.
As a reading aid, the opposite degree is Leo 7, star patterns spread across the heavens. The constellations are pattern that seems fixed and lasting; the infant breaking from the shell is pattern breaking open, and the pair holds permanence beside emergence.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Aquarius 6°00′ up to, but not including, Aquarius 7°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Aquarius 6°30′ reads Aquarius 7, and so does one at Aquarius 6°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Aquarius 8 after Aquarius 6°59′, or back into Aquarius 6 before Aquarius 6°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 7 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Aquarius 6, Aquarius 8 and Leo 7 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 6 and Aquarius 8, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Leo 7, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Aquarius 6°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Aquarius 7; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Aquarius 6. 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: Life emerges whole from a form that has to be broken.
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
- Aquarius 6: Ritual role the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Aquarius 8: Perfect but lifeless the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Leo 7: Enduring pattern the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Aquarius in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
