The image
Rows of stalls in a square or a street, awnings up, tables piled with produce, cloth, tools and odds and ends. People move between them, stopping, asking, chatting. The picture is crowded and lively, a public place where everyone brings something and looks for something.
The market is read here as an image of meeting and exchange among people, and nothing on this page concerns trade or gain.
Meaning
Our keyword is "Exchange", and our keynote: many needs and many goods meet in one open place. Both are ours.
A market is one of the oldest forms of community: strangers come together because each has what another lacks. We read the degree as the quality of openness to others' needs and offerings, the give and take that makes a common life. One way to see it is in a person who connects people, who knows who has what and who needs it, or who is at home in the noise of a crowded place. In the last sign, the image can also be read as the many-sidedness of experience itself, all kinds of things laid out together. The tradition reads the picture as a description and attaches no outcome to it.
Read with Lynda Hill's rule, the earlier degree is a background and the later degree an aim. Before it comes Aquarius 30, Ardath's field in blossom, a solitary place of vision; here the open field has become an open market full of people. After it comes Pisces 2, a squirrel keeping out of the hunters' sight, where the public bustle gives way to a small creature that survives by staying hidden.
As a reading aid, the opposite degree is Virgo 1, the head of a man and nothing more. The head is thought on its own, separated from the body and the crowd; the market is life in all its mixture, and the two can be read as the thinking self and the world it meets.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Pisces 0°00′ up to, but not including, Pisces 1°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Pisces 0°18′ reads Pisces 1, and so does one at Pisces 0°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Pisces 2 after Pisces 0°59′, or back into Aquarius 30 before Pisces 0°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 Pisces 1 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Aquarius 30, Pisces 2 and Virgo 1 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 30 and Pisces 2, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Virgo 1, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Pisces 0°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Pisces 1; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Aquarius 30. 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: Many needs and many goods meet in one open place.
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 30: A field of vision the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Pisces 2: Self-protection the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Virgo 1: The thinking self the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Pisces in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to