The image
A flag, flying or furled, changes before the viewer's eyes into an eagle, which spreads its wings and takes flight. The picture is a transformation, as in a dream: the cloth emblem and the living bird are the same thing at two moments.
The image is read as a symbol of meaning coming alive. The bird is no heraldic eagle but a living one, as Marc Edmund Jones wrote it down from the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler.
Meaning
Our keyword is "Symbol becomes power", and our keynote: what stood for an ideal becomes a living force. Both are ours.
A flag represents; an eagle flies. We read the degree as the moment when an idea people have only pointed to becomes something they live and do. One way to see it is in an ideal that stops being a slogan and starts shaping choices, or in a person who comes to embody what they once only admired. The image can also be read as a caution about symbols that take on a life of their own, since an emblem given wings can carry people further than they meant to go. Readers of the Sabian symbols take the picture as a description and leave the balance to the chart and the person.
Lynda Hill's approach sets the picture between a background just behind and a pursuit just ahead. The degree before is Aquarius 8, waxwork figures in fine gowns, perfect forms with no life; here a form comes to life. The degree after is Aquarius 10, popularity that does not last, a reminder that the force a symbol gathers can fade as quickly as it rose.
As a reading aid, the opposite degree is Leo 9, a craftsman blowing glass. Both pictures are about giving form; the glassblower shapes a material slowly with breath and skill, while here a form transforms on its own into a living creature.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Aquarius 8°00′ up to, but not including, Aquarius 9°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Aquarius 8°44′ reads Aquarius 9, and so does one at Aquarius 8°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Aquarius 10 after Aquarius 8°59′, or back into Aquarius 8 before Aquarius 8°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 9 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Aquarius 8, Aquarius 10 and Leo 9 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 8 and Aquarius 10, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Leo 9, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Aquarius 8°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Aquarius 9; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Aquarius 8. 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 stood for an ideal becomes a living force.
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 8: Perfect but lifeless the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Aquarius 10: Fleeting acclaim the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Leo 9: Shaping glass the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Aquarius in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
