The image
The image is the old story's treasure, gold in a pot, waiting where the coloured arc comes down to earth. In the folk tale the rainbow's end is never reached, because it moves as one walks toward it. The picture shows both the arc of colour and the pot together, as if the treasure were really there. Jones took the picture down in San Diego in 1925 from Elsie Wheeler's description of the card for Taurus 4.
Meaning
The tradition reads the rainbow and its gold as hope with a direction. The treasure may never be found where the story puts it, but the rainbow still points somewhere and makes a person set out. Our keyword is Promised reward, and our keynote reads it carefully: hope points to a treasure that is real as a direction, if not as a place. In a chart one way to read a placement here is as a place where aspiration, idealism or a long goal gives life its shape. The image is read as a symbol of motive; it promises no gold and no gain, and we read it as nothing more than that.
Lynda Hill reads a degree beside the degree before it, the Karmic Condition, and the degree after it, the Quest Degree. The one before is Taurus 3, stairs climbing to a lawn of flowering clover; the one after is Taurus 5, a widow standing beside a freshly dug grave. So by her rule a gentle climb leads to a bright promise, and the promise to a sober picture of an ending, a sequence from hope to its limits. The degree opposite, Scorpio 4, shows a young person holding a burning candle; as a reading aid it sets a small, carried light beside a great arc that cannot be held.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Taurus 3°00′ up to, but not including, Taurus 4°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Taurus 3°09′ reads Taurus 4, and so does one at Taurus 3°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Taurus 5 after Taurus 3°59′, or back into Taurus 3 before Taurus 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 Taurus 4 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Taurus 3, Taurus 5 and Scorpio 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
- Taurus 3 and Taurus 5, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Scorpio 4, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Taurus 3°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Taurus 4; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Taurus 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: Hope points to a treasure that is real as a direction, if not as a place.
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
- Taurus 3: Easy ascent the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Taurus 5: Grief that opens the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Scorpio 4: Carrying the flame the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Taurus in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
