The image
A small company of men on a road or a path, or seated together in talk, all intent on the same question. They are seekers, looking for understanding of a deeper kind than ordinary knowledge. The picture gives no teacher and no answer, only the shared search.
The search is read here as an image of a quest, with no claim about where, or whether, such light is found.
Meaning
Our keyword is "Shared quest", and our keynote: several people look together for a light they believe in. Both are ours.
Seeking alone and seeking with others are different experiences. We read the degree as the companionship of a common question: people who may disagree about much but are joined by the wish to understand. One way to see it is in study groups, pilgrim bands, research teams or friendships that grow up around a shared search for meaning. The image can also be read for its open end, since a search defined by what it has not yet found can go on a long time, and the company itself may become the reward. The tradition reads a degree's picture as a description and does not say what the seekers find.
In the way Lynda Hill reads neighbours, the previous degree is a starting condition and the next one a quest. Before it comes Pisces 10, a pilot up among the clouds, a solitary rise into the heights; here the rise becomes a group's search. After it comes Pisces 12, initiates under examination, where the search reaches a threshold and those who seek are tested.
As a reading aid, the opposite degree is Virgo 11, a son shaped by the hopes his mother holds for him. Both images are about where a direction comes from; the son's is set by another's expectations, the seekers' by a question they have chosen, and the pair can be read as given purpose beside sought purpose.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Pisces 10°00′ up to, but not including, Pisces 11°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Pisces 10°28′ reads Pisces 11, and so does one at Pisces 10°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Pisces 12 after Pisces 10°59′, or back into Pisces 10 before Pisces 10°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 11 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Pisces 10, Pisces 12 and Virgo 11 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 10 and Pisces 12, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Virgo 11, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Pisces 10°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Pisces 11; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Pisces 10. 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: Several people look together for a light they believe in.
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 10: Above the everyday the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Pisces 12: Under examination the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Virgo 11: Moulded by expectation the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Pisces in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
