The image
A woman stands or sits alone, and something in her bearing says that what she hoped for has not come. The picture does not show what disappointed her, only the aftermath: the clear, unhappy look of someone who now sees things as they are. In 1925 the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler saw this picture for an unseen card, the one marked Aquarius 21.
Meaning
Our keyword is "Courage after loss", and our keynote: when hopes fail, dignity remains a choice. Both are ours.
Disillusion is hard, but it is also the end of a mistake. We read the degree as the moment when a person stops believing something that was never true and has to decide how to carry on. Our keyword puts the weight on courage: not the absence of disappointment but the refusal to be defined by it. One way to see the image is in someone who has been let down by a person, a cause or a plan and who meets the truth with self-respect intact. The image can also be read as the start of a clearer kind of hope, built on what is real. The tradition reads the picture as a description.
The practice of Lynda Hill is to look to the degree behind for background and to the degree ahead for direction. Before it comes Aquarius 20, news carried by a great white dove, good news arriving; here the news has been of another kind. After it comes Aquarius 22, children given a rug to play on, where someone's care makes a soft, safe place again.
As a reading aid, the opposite degree is Leo 21, chickens that have been made drunk. Both images concern a misjudgement; the chickens have taken more than they can carry, the woman has hoped for more than was there, and the two can be read as foolishness and the sobriety that can follow it.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Aquarius 20°00′ up to, but not including, Aquarius 21°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Aquarius 20°08′ reads Aquarius 21, and so does one at Aquarius 20°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Aquarius 22 after Aquarius 20°59′, or back into Aquarius 20 before Aquarius 20°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 21 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Aquarius 20, Aquarius 22 and Leo 21 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 20 and Aquarius 22, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Leo 21, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Aquarius 20°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Aquarius 21; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Aquarius 20. 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: When hopes fail, dignity remains a choice.
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 20: Message of peace the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Aquarius 22: A place to play the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Leo 21: Misjudged capacity the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Aquarius in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
