The image
The sky at new Moon, dark where the Moon would be, and something of its pull or light divided, as if two currents ran from it toward different shores. The image is less a view than a diagram of forces: one source, two directions.
The Moon here is part of a picture, and the degree is not read as a statement about what the Moon does to anyone.
Meaning
Our keyword is "Divided beginning" and our keynote: a fresh start sends its power in more than one direction.
A new Moon is a beginning, and here the beginning does not point one way. We read the degree as the experience of starting something with more than one aim, or of a single impulse that opens two roads. One way to see it is in a person who begins a new period with two loyalties, two projects or two possible directions, and who has to decide whether to divide their energy or to choose. The image can also be read as richness, a source strong enough to feed more than one stream. The tradition reads a degree's picture as descriptive, and this one describes the shape of a beginning, not its result.
Following Lynda Hill, this image can be placed after the one it grows from and before the one it reaches toward. It grows from Pisces 25, priests purged from their own order, a clearing out; here something new begins in the cleared space. It reaches toward Pisces 27, the full moon of harvest time, where a new Moon's divided start is answered by a full Moon's single light over the fields.
The opposite degree, Virgo 26, a boy swinging incense in a censer, can be read beside this one as a reading aid. The boy's service has one clear form, learned and repeated; the new Moon's influence has two, and the pair sets a single devotion beside a divided beginning.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Pisces 25°00′ up to, but not including, Pisces 26°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Pisces 25°43′ reads Pisces 26, and so does one at Pisces 25°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Pisces 27 after Pisces 25°59′, or back into Pisces 25 before Pisces 25°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 26 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Pisces 25, Pisces 27 and Virgo 26 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 25 and Pisces 27, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Virgo 26, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Pisces 25°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Pisces 26; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Pisces 25. 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: A fresh start sends its power in more than one direction.
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 25: Cleansing the priesthood the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Pisces 27: Fulfilment the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Virgo 26: Apprenticed service the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Pisces in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
