The image
A tree lies on the ground where it was felled, and someone has sawn the trunk into lengths: logs for a fire, timber for building. Sawdust is around them. The picture shows the work done and the tree changed, from a standing living thing into material. Jones took the picture down in San Diego in 1925 from Elsie Wheeler's description of the card for Aquarius 28.
Meaning
Our keyword is "Sacrifice for provision" and our keynote: something living is cut down so that it can be used.
The image is plain and a little sad. A tree grew for decades, and now it is firewood or planks. We read the degree as the cost of provision: to keep a household warm or to build a home, something has to be given up. One way to see it is in choices where a person lets go of something they valued so that it can serve a practical need, a hobby set aside for work, a long-grown plan turned into usable parts. The image can also be read as transformation, since the tree's life continues in the warmth and shelter it gives. The tradition reads such pictures as descriptions and leaves their weight to the reader.
In Lynda Hill's reading, the neighbours carry the image's background and its direction, in that order. The degree before is Aquarius 27, violets in a bowl of very old pottery, the old holding the living; here the living is cut down for use. The degree after is Aquarius 29, a butterfly working its way out of the chrysalis, where something that seemed ended is transformed into a new kind of life.
The opposite degree, Leo 28, lots of small birds crowded along one branch of a huge tree, serves as a reading aid. There the tree stands and shelters a community; here the tree is felled to provide for one, and the two images hold the living tree and the used one side by side.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Aquarius 27°00′ up to, but not including, Aquarius 28°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Aquarius 27°27′ reads Aquarius 28, and so does one at Aquarius 27°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Aquarius 29 after Aquarius 27°59′, or back into Aquarius 27 before Aquarius 27°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 28 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Aquarius 27, Aquarius 29 and Leo 28 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 27 and Aquarius 29, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Leo 28, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Aquarius 27°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Aquarius 28; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Aquarius 27. 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 living is cut down so that it can be used.
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 27: Old vessel, living flowers the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Aquarius 29: Metamorphosis the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Leo 28: Sheltered community the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Aquarius in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
