Candidates for initiation facing their examination

The image

A group of candidates stands before examiners: elders, teachers or the members of an order. They have asked to be admitted and must first show what they know or who they are. The picture holds the moment of testing, before any verdict is given.

The examination is read as an image of a threshold, not as any particular order's rite. No verdict is shown.

Meaning

Our keyword is "Under examination" and our keynote: those who seek to enter are tested first.

Any community worth joining asks something of those who join. We read the degree as the experience of being tested on the way into a new level of belonging, knowledge or responsibility: an exam, an apprenticeship, a probation, a rite of passage. One way to see it is in the nervousness and resolve of someone who has prepared and must now show it. The image can also be read from the examiners' side, as the duty to judge fairly those who want to come in. Readers of the Sabian symbols take the picture as a description and do not say who passes.

Hill treats the two neighbours as the background a degree carries and the goal it moves toward. The degree before is Pisces 11, men searching for enlightenment, a quest still open; here the seekers arrive at a door. The degree after is Pisces 13, a sword shown in a museum, where testing gives way to a picture of power retired and honoured.

The opposite degree, Virgo 12, someone pulling the veil off a bride, works as a reading aid. Both pictures are about a moment of revelation at a threshold; the bride is unveiled at a wedding, the initiates are examined at an entry, and in each what was hidden is brought into the light.

In a chart

A planet or point anywhere from Pisces 11°00′ up to, but not including, Pisces 12°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Pisces 11°05′ reads Pisces 12, and so does one at Pisces 11°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Pisces 13 after Pisces 11°59′, or back into Pisces 11 before Pisces 11°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 12 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Pisces 11, Pisces 13 and Virgo 12 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 11 and Pisces 13, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced

Degree opposite

Virgo 12, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction

A position at Pisces 11°00′00″

Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Pisces 12; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Pisces 11. 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: Those who seek to enter are tested first.

Claims about it

• The image line on this page, or on any site, is Elsie Wheeler's own wording.

  false

  What 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.

• Reading the degree before and the degree after is part of how the zodiac is built, or of Jones's method.

  false

  What the record shows: It is Lynda Hill's practice, and the two names are hers. We show the two degrees with her name.

• Dane Rudhyar's 1973 lines are the Sabian symbols and free to print.

  false

  What 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 11: Shared quest the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
• Pisces 13: Retired power the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
• Virgo 12: Unveiling the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
• Pisces in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to