The image
A girl lifts a bugle and plays a call: bright, loud notes that carry across a camp or a field. The bugle is an instrument of signals, used to wake, to gather and to mark the hours, and here it is in the hands of someone not usually expected to give the signal. The picture comes from a single day's sitting in San Diego in 1925, the day Wheeler and Jones recorded Pisces 8.
Meaning
Our keyword is "Call to attention" and our keynote: a clear, unexpected voice summons others to act.
The surprise in the picture is who is calling. We read the degree as the power of a voice that cuts through routine and is heard because it is clear, not because it has rank. One way to see it is in a person who speaks up when others are silent, or who has a knack for gathering people and setting them moving. The bugle's notes are simple and carry far, so the image can also be read as the value of plain speech at the right moment. In a sign of dreams and dissolving edges, the call is a moment of wakefulness. The tradition takes the picture as a description and does not tie it to any outcome.
Lynda Hill reads the degrees beside a placement as its background and its aspiration. The degree before is Pisces 7, rocks with a cross laid across them, stillness and rest; here stillness is broken by a call. The degree after is Pisces 9, a jockey riding a racehorse, where the summons turns into full-speed effort toward a goal.
The opposite degree, Virgo 8, learning to dance for the first time, can be read beside this one as a reading aid. The bugle gives a rhythm others follow; the beginner dancer is still learning to follow one, and the pair holds giving the beat beside finding it.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Pisces 7°00′ up to, but not including, Pisces 8°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Pisces 7°37′ reads Pisces 8, and so does one at Pisces 7°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Pisces 9 after Pisces 7°59′, or back into Pisces 7 before Pisces 7°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 8 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Pisces 7, Pisces 9 and Virgo 8 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 7 and Pisces 9, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Virgo 8, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Pisces 7°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Pisces 8; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Pisces 7. 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 clear, unexpected voice summons others to act.
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 7: The cross at rest the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Pisces 9: Driving for the goal the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Virgo 8: Learning rhythm the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Pisces in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
