The image
A church hall or yard set out with tables: cakes, jams, books, old clothes and handmade things, given by members and sold to neighbours. People come as much to meet as to browse, and the helpers know most of the customers by name. The picture is a familiar parish occasion.
The sale is read here as an image of fellowship and giving, and nothing on this page is about anyone's means.
Meaning
Our keyword is "Fellowship through giving", and our keynote: a community trades and gives for a purpose beyond gain. Both are ours.
What matters in a church sale is less what changes hands than the reason for it: people give their time and their goods to support something they share. We read the degree as practical generosity inside a community, the kind of giving that is also a way of belonging. One way to see it is in volunteers who bake, sort and serve so that a common cause can go on, or in a person who finds meaning in contributing modestly to something larger. The image can also be read for its homeliness, faith expressed through ordinary objects and small talk. The tradition reads the picture as descriptive.
By the practice Lynda Hill describes, the image before is the setting this one inherits and the image after is its next reach. Before it comes Pisces 4, a narrow neck of land crowded with traffic, many people passing through; here many people gather for one purpose. After it comes Pisces 6, officers on parade in their dress uniforms, where an informal gathering gives way to formal display.
As a reading aid, the opposite degree is Virgo 5, fairies appearing in a sleeping man's dreams. The dreamer's fairies are private and imagined; the church sale is public and practical, and the two pictures can be read as inner enchantment and outer fellowship.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Pisces 4°00′ up to, but not including, Pisces 5°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Pisces 4°46′ reads Pisces 5, and so does one at Pisces 4°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Pisces 6 after Pisces 4°59′, or back into Pisces 4 before Pisces 4°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 5 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Pisces 4, Pisces 6 and Virgo 5 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 4 and Pisces 6, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Virgo 5, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Pisces 4°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Pisces 5; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Pisces 4. 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: A community trades and gives for a purpose beyond gain.
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 4: Congested passage the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Pisces 6: Disciplined display the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Virgo 5: Dreams of fairies the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Pisces in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
