The image
An aeroplane of the early kind, and its pilot, high up among banks of cloud. The ground is out of sight; around him is white and blue, light and vapour. In 1925 such flight was still new, and the picture carries some of that wonder. Jones took the picture down in San Diego in 1925 from Elsie Wheeler's description of the card for Pisces 10.
Meaning
Our keyword is "Above the everyday" and our keynote: flight takes a person up into a world of cloud.
A pilot among clouds is both free and dependent on skill: the view is wide, but there is nothing to stand on. We read the degree as the experience of rising above ordinary concerns, whether in imagination, study, devotion or simple delight in height and space. One way to see it is in a person who needs regular escape into a larger perspective, or who brings a sense of distance and calm to problems others are lost in. The image can also be read for its risk of losing touch with the ground, since clouds hide the land below. The tradition reads the picture as a description and leaves the balance to the person.
Lynda Hill's reading sets this picture after one image and before another, the first as source and the second as course. The degree before is Pisces 9, a jockey riding a racehorse, effort on the ground toward a goal; here the effort has lifted off. The degree after is Pisces 11, men searching for enlightenment, where the solitary flight above the clouds becomes a shared search for light.
The opposite degree, Virgo 10, two heads peering out past the darkness, serves as a reading aid. Both images look beyond what is near; the two heads see past shadow and doubt, while the pilot rises above the cloud, and the pair holds looking through beside rising over.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Pisces 9°00′ up to, but not including, Pisces 10°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Pisces 9°51′ reads Pisces 10, and so does one at Pisces 9°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Pisces 11 after Pisces 9°59′, or back into Pisces 9 before Pisces 9°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 10 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Pisces 9, Pisces 11 and Virgo 10 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 9 and Pisces 11, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Virgo 10, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Pisces 9°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Pisces 10; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Pisces 9. 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: Flight takes a person up into a world of cloud.
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 9: Driving for the goal the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Pisces 11: Shared quest the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Virgo 10: Seeing past doubt the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Pisces in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
