The image
A parade ground, and officers in full dress uniform marching or standing in ranks: braid, buttons and polished boots, every line straight. The occasion is ceremonial, not a battle; the picture is about appearance, discipline and the pleasure of a formation done well.
The parade is a ceremony of rank, with no fighting in view. Marc Edmund Jones wrote the picture down in San Diego in 1925, as the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler described Pisces 6.
Meaning
Our keyword is "Disciplined display" and our keynote: order and rank are shown in their finest form.
A dress parade shows what discipline looks like when it is put on view. We read the degree as the satisfaction of order made visible: everyone in place, every detail attended to, a group presenting itself at its best. One way to see it is in ceremonies, performances and occasions where people take care over how things look because the look carries meaning. The image can also be read for its formality, a display that may hide the rougher reality behind it. In a sign often linked with dissolving boundaries, the picture describes the opposite pull, toward clear lines and rank. The tradition reads it as a description.
Lynda Hill looks back one degree for background and forward one degree for direction. The degree before is Pisces 5, a sale of goods held by a church, informal fellowship; here fellowship takes the form of ranks. The degree after is Pisces 7, rocks with a cross laid across them, where the polished parade gives way to a bare sign set among hard, plain things.
The opposite degree, Virgo 6, a carousel turning, serves as a reading aid. Both are pictures of patterned movement; the carousel goes round and round for pleasure, while the officers march in straight lines for ceremony, and the pair sets play beside discipline.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Pisces 5°00′ up to, but not including, Pisces 6°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Pisces 5°23′ reads Pisces 6, and so does one at Pisces 5°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Pisces 7 after Pisces 5°59′, or back into Pisces 5 before Pisces 5°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 6 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Pisces 5, Pisces 7 and Virgo 6 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 5 and Pisces 7, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Virgo 6, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Pisces 5°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Pisces 6; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Pisces 5. 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: Order and rank are shown in their finest form.
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 5: Fellowship through giving the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Pisces 7: The cross at rest the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Virgo 6: Circular motion the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Pisces in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
