The image
A bowl of pottery, plainly very old, chipped perhaps, its glaze worn, and in it a heap of fresh violets, small and purple, just picked. The contrast is the picture: a made thing that has lasted for generations and flowers that last a few days. In 1925 the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler saw this picture for an unseen card, the one marked Aquarius 27.
Meaning
Our keyword is "Old vessel, living flowers", and our keynote: something made long ago holds flowers. Both are ours.
The bowl and the violets need each other: the flowers would scatter without the vessel, and the vessel would only be an object without the flowers. We read the degree as the meeting of tradition and the present, old forms filled with new life. One way to see it is in a family custom kept alive by its youngest members, an old song sung in a new voice, or a person who uses what they have inherited to hold something fresh. Violets are modest flowers, so the image can also be read as the beauty of small, quiet things set in a frame that honours them. The Sabian tradition takes the picture as a description of a quality to recognise.
Lynda Hill sets the degree before as the condition this image starts from and the degree after as its quest. The degree before is Aquarius 26, a hydrometer gauging density, measurement and precision; here the attention turns to beauty. The degree after is Aquarius 28, a tree cut down and sawn into lengths, where something living is given up so that it can be used.
As a reading aid, the opposite degree is Leo 27, the first light of day. Both images join the old and the new; dawn is the oldest of daily events and is new each morning, and the violets in the old bowl make the same point on a small scale.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Aquarius 26°00′ up to, but not including, Aquarius 27°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Aquarius 26°50′ reads Aquarius 27, and so does one at Aquarius 26°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Aquarius 28 after Aquarius 26°59′, or back into Aquarius 26 before Aquarius 26°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 27 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Aquarius 26, Aquarius 28 and Leo 27 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 26 and Aquarius 28, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Leo 27, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Aquarius 26°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Aquarius 27; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Aquarius 26. 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: Something made long ago holds flowers.
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 26: Measuring the charge the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Aquarius 28: Sacrifice for provision the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Leo 27: Beginning of awareness the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Aquarius in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
