The image
A sword lies in a museum case or hangs on a gallery wall, labelled and lit. It is polished, perhaps ornate, and its fighting days are over. Visitors look at it as an object of history and craft.
The sword is described here as an exhibit only. Elsie Wheeler described the picture in 1925, and Marc Edmund Jones pencilled it on the card for Pisces 13.
Meaning
Our keyword is "Retired power", and our keynote: what fought is now honoured as history. Both are ours.
Once it is put on display, a sword changes its meaning: it was made to cut, and now it is kept to be looked at. We read the degree as the passage from struggle into memory, the point at which an old battle, a hard-won position or a fierce part of oneself is no longer needed and can be respected for what it was. One way to see it is in a person who has put down a fight and keeps its story as part of who they are. The image can also be read as a question of whether the weapon is truly retired or only resting. The tradition reads the picture as a description and attaches no outcome to it.
Lynda Hill's practice frames this image with the one behind, as background, and the one ahead, as purpose. Before it comes Pisces 12, initiates under examination, a test still in progress; here the trials are over and their emblem is on display. After it comes Pisces 14, a woman wearing a fox fur, where the sword's hard protection gives way to a soft and showy one.
As a reading aid, the opposite degree is Virgo 13, political frenzy calmed by a firm hand. Both are pictures of force brought under control; the firm hand restrains it in the present, while the museum keeps it safely in the past.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Pisces 12°00′ up to, but not including, Pisces 13°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Pisces 12°42′ reads Pisces 13, and so does one at Pisces 12°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Pisces 14 after Pisces 12°59′, or back into Pisces 12 before Pisces 12°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 13 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Pisces 12, Pisces 14 and Virgo 13 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 12 and Pisces 14, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Virgo 13, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Pisces 12°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Pisces 13; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Pisces 12. 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: What fought is now honoured as history.
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 12: Under examination the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Pisces 14: Luxurious protection the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Virgo 13: Firm control the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Pisces in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
