An island with its own small community

The image

An island in open water, and on it houses, paths, boats drawn up on the shore, people going about their days. The sea surrounds everything; there is only so much land, and everyone on it knows everyone else. The picture is of a whole small world with clear edges.

The image gives the island no name. Marc Edmund Jones wrote the picture down in San Diego in 1925, as the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler described Pisces 24.

Meaning

Our keyword is "Bounded community" and our keynote: limits of space make interdependence unavoidable.

On an island no one can simply move away from a neighbour. We read the degree as the strength and the strain of a life lived within limits: people learn to depend on one another, to share what there is and to settle disagreements because they must go on living side by side. One way to see it is in tight-knit groups, small towns or families where everyone matters because there are few. The image can also be read as self-containment, a person or a group that has made a complete world within its borders. In the last sign of the zodiac, a sign of the sea, the island is a picture of form holding its own amid the boundless. The tradition reads such pictures as descriptions.

In Lynda Hill's way of reading, a degree is shaped by the one it follows and points toward the one it precedes. This one follows Pisces 23, spirit phenomena in a darkened room, a reach beyond all limits; here the limits are the shore. It precedes Pisces 25, priests purged from their own order, where a bounded community has to decide what belongs within it.

The opposite degree, Virgo 24, a white lamb trailing after Mary, serves as a reading aid. Both pictures are of belonging; the lamb follows one person wherever she goes, while the islanders belong to a place and to one another.

In a chart

A planet or point anywhere from Pisces 23°00′ up to, but not including, Pisces 24°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Pisces 23°29′ reads Pisces 24, and so does one at Pisces 23°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Pisces 25 after Pisces 23°59′, or back into Pisces 23 before Pisces 23°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 24 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Pisces 23, Pisces 25 and Virgo 24 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 23 and Pisces 25, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced

Degree opposite

Virgo 24, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction

A position at Pisces 23°00′00″

Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Pisces 24; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Pisces 23. 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: Limits of space make interdependence unavoidable.

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 23: Contact with the unseen the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
• Pisces 25: Cleansing the priesthood the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
• Virgo 24: Innocent devotion the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
• Pisces in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to