The image
The picture is a woman tending her blooms with a watering can or a sprinkler, giving each plant a little water. It is not a great garden or a show; it is a routine, done because flowers need it every day. The image stresses the small, repeated act more than the flowers themselves. Of the 360 pictures Elsie Wheeler described in 1925 as Marc Edmund Jones wrote them down, this is Taurus 11.
Meaning
The tradition reads the image as the value of daily care. Beauty in a garden does not last on its own; it depends on someone coming back, again and again, with water. Our keyword is Daily nurture, and our keynote reads it in one line: beauty is kept alive by small, regular attentions. In a chart one way to read a placement here is as a place where steady, unglamorous tending, of a home, a friendship or a piece of work, keeps something lovely alive. Nothing dramatic happens in the picture; that is its point. The reward is in the flowers that are still there tomorrow.
Lynda Hill reads the degree before as the Karmic Condition and the degree after as the Quest Degree. The one before is Taurus 10, a nurse wearing the Red Cross; the one after is Taurus 12, people looking into shop windows. By her rule impartial care for strangers narrows to care for a few flowers, and the gardener's patient tending looks ahead to the browsing of passers-by, beauty grown on one side, beauty shown on the other. The degree opposite, Scorpio 11, shows someone pulling a man out of the water before he goes under; as a reading aid it sets a single urgent rescue beside this degree's quiet, daily keeping-alive.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Taurus 10°00′ up to, but not including, Taurus 11°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Taurus 10°28′ reads Taurus 11, and so does one at Taurus 10°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Taurus 12 after Taurus 10°59′, or back into Taurus 10 before Taurus 10°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 11 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Taurus 10, Taurus 12 and Scorpio 11 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 10 and Taurus 12, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Scorpio 11, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Taurus 10°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Taurus 11; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Taurus 10. 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: Beauty is kept alive by small, regular attentions.
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 10: Impartial care the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Taurus 12: Looking before choosing the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Scorpio 11: Saved from the deep the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Taurus in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
