The image
The picture is a fir tree indoors, hung with ornaments: baubles, lights or tinsel, the familiar dress of a winter holiday. No family or presents are described, though the tree implies them. A tree that would otherwise be timber or forest is set in the middle of a room and made the centre of a season. In 1925 the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler saw this picture for an unseen card, the one marked Taurus 9.
Meaning
The tradition reads the decorated tree as ritual at work. Its value is not in the wood or the glass but in what people do around it together, and the decoration makes it a sign that this is a time for giving and gathering. Our keyword is Festive display, and our keynote reads it in one sentence: a shared ritual turns an ordinary object into a sign of generosity. In a chart one way to read a placement here is as a place where celebration, custom and presentation matter, where a person enjoys making an occasion for others or marking a season. The image is a picture of a custom.
Lynda Hill reads the degree before and after a placement as its Karmic Condition and Quest Degree. Before Taurus 9 is Taurus 8, the sleigh with no snow; after it is Taurus 10, a nurse wearing the Red Cross. By her rule a thing waiting for its season gives way to a season fully arrived, and the festival's generosity looks ahead to care offered to anyone in need. The degree opposite, Scorpio 9, shows a dentist working on teeth; read beside it as a reading aid, it sets a plain, practical service against this degree's bright, ceremonial one.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Taurus 8°00′ up to, but not including, Taurus 9°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Taurus 8°14′ reads Taurus 9, and so does one at Taurus 8°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Taurus 10 after Taurus 8°59′, or back into Taurus 8 before Taurus 8°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 Taurus 9 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Taurus 8, Taurus 10 and Scorpio 9 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
- Taurus 8 and Taurus 10, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Scorpio 9, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Taurus 8°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Taurus 9; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Taurus 8. 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 shared ritual turns an ordinary object into a sign of generosity.
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
- Taurus 8: Out of season the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Taurus 10: Impartial care the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Scorpio 9: Repairing what bites the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Taurus in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
