The image
An isthmus, a strip of land between two bodies of water, and along it a road thick with vehicles, people and carts, all passing in both directions because there is no other way across. The water on either side is open; the land between is crowded. Jones took the picture down in San Diego in 1925 from Elsie Wheeler's description of the card for Pisces 4.
Meaning
Our keyword is "Congested passage" and our keynote: much movement must pass through one narrow way.
A narrow land bridge becomes important precisely because it is narrow. We read the degree as the experience of being, or passing through, a point where many paths converge: a bottleneck, a crossroads, a person through whom much has to flow. One way to see it is in someone who links two communities or two areas of life and is busy because of it, or in a stretch of time when everything seems to need doing at once. The image can also be read as pressure, the strain of a single route carrying too much. Readers of the Sabian symbols take it as a description and attach no outcome to the crowding.
Lynda Hill's Karmic Condition and Quest Degree are simply the degrees on either side, which she reads as past and aim. The degree before is Pisces 3, trees long since turned to stone, the still and preserved; here everything is moving. The degree after is Pisces 5, a sale of goods held by a church, where the crowd on the road becomes a crowd gathered for a shared purpose.
The opposite degree, Virgo 4, children of different colours playing together, can be read beside this one as a reading aid. Both pictures bring many kinds of people into one small space; the children mix freely in play, while the travellers on the isthmus share a narrow road because they must.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Pisces 3°00′ up to, but not including, Pisces 4°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Pisces 3°09′ reads Pisces 4, and so does one at Pisces 3°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Pisces 5 after Pisces 3°59′, or back into Pisces 3 before Pisces 3°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 4 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Pisces 3, Pisces 5 and Virgo 4 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
- Pisces 3 and Pisces 5, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Virgo 4, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Pisces 3°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Pisces 4; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Pisces 3. 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: Much movement must pass through one narrow way.
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
- Pisces 3: Fossilised past the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Pisces 5: Fellowship through giving the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Virgo 4: Natural equality the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Pisces in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
