The image
Plates, bread and covered dishes wait on a table, with the chairs drawn up for the evening. No one has sat down yet. The picture is of readiness, the moment when the work of cooking is done and the meal waits for those who are coming.
The meal is read here as an image of hospitality and care, and nothing on this page concerns diet or the body.
Meaning
Our keyword is "Prepared nourishment" and our keynote: care lays out what sustains those who gather.
A laid table is a promise of company and a sign that someone has thought ahead. We read the degree as the quiet work of providing: cooking, arranging, making a space where people can sit together and be fed in more than one sense. One way to see it is in a person who expresses care through practical hospitality, or in the shared meals that hold households and friendships together. The image can also be read as anticipation, the table waiting for those who may or may not arrive. Readers of the Sabian symbols take the picture as a description and attach no outcome to it.
Hill's practice gives this degree a neighbour behind, as its starting place, and one ahead, as its aim. The degree before is Pisces 19, a pupil taught by a master, nourishment of the mind; here the nourishment is a meal. The degree after is Pisces 21, a child holding a small white lamb with a Chinese attendant close by, where the prepared table gives way to a picture of tenderness and faithful company.
The opposite degree, Virgo 20, a long line of motor cars travelling together, can be read beside this one as a reading aid. The cars are people on the move together; the supper is people about to gather and stay, and between them is the journey and the table at its end.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Pisces 19°00′ up to, but not including, Pisces 20°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Pisces 19°01′ reads Pisces 20, and so does one at Pisces 19°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Pisces 21 after Pisces 19°59′, or back into Pisces 19 before Pisces 19°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 20 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Pisces 19, Pisces 21 and Virgo 20 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 19 and Pisces 21, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Virgo 20, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Pisces 19°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Pisces 20; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Pisces 19. 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: Care lays out what sustains those who gather.
Claims about it
-
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.
-
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.
-
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 19: Transmission the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Pisces 21: Tender company the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Virgo 20: Collective migration the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Pisces in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
