The image
A darkened room of the spiritualist kind popular in the early twentieth century: a circle of sitters, perhaps a cabinet or a table, and the phenomena the movement reported, raps, lights, voices or shapes. The image shows what participants described, not anything this page affirms.
Elsie Wheeler, who described the 360 images to Marc Edmund Jones, worked in San Diego as a spiritualist medium, Lynda Hill's account of her life records.
Meaning
Our keyword is "Contact with the unseen", and our keynote: something from beyond is given form for those present. Both are ours.
Whatever one thinks of séances, the image describes a longing that is very widespread: to make the invisible visible, to have some sign that there is more than the ordinary world. We read the degree as that longing and its expression, the effort to give form to intuitions, feelings and presences that are otherwise hard to grasp. One way to see it is in art, ritual or quiet reflection that brings the hidden into view for others. The image can also be read for the risk of seeing what one wants to see, which the spiritualist movement itself argued about. The Sabian tradition reads the picture as descriptive, and nothing here asserts contact with the departed.
Lynda Hill reads a placement with the degrees that bracket it, the lower one as its ground and the higher one as its goal. Its ground is Pisces 22, a man carrying the new law down from Sinai, revelation received openly on a mountain; here the revelation is sought in a closed room. Its goal is Pisces 24, an island where people live, where the reach beyond gives way to life lived within clear limits.
As a reading aid, the opposite degree is Virgo 23, a man who trains animals. The trainer brings visible, physical forces under control by patience; the séance tries to call up invisible forces, and the two can be read as mastery of the seen and reaching for the unseen.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Pisces 22°00′ up to, but not including, Pisces 23°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Pisces 22°52′ reads Pisces 23, and so does one at Pisces 22°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Pisces 24 after Pisces 22°59′, or back into Pisces 22 before Pisces 22°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 23 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Pisces 22, Pisces 24 and Virgo 23 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 22 and Pisces 24, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Virgo 23, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Pisces 22°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Pisces 23; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Pisces 22. 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: Something from beyond is given form for those present.
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 22: Revelation carried down the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Pisces 24: Bounded community the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Virgo 23: Mastering force the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Pisces in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
