The image
The image is a man occupied with bags and cases: lifting, stacking, carrying or sorting them, as a porter at a station or a traveller at a door might. Whose luggage it is and where it is going are not said. The picture is about the handling itself, the weight and the care needed so that nothing is dropped or lost.
Meaning
Read as a symbol, the luggage is everything that has to be moved for life to go on: belongings, responsibilities, the practical side of any journey. Someone has to carry it, and doing that well is a skill. Our keyword is Handling the load, and our keynote reads it in one line: practical hands take care of what has to be moved. The tradition would read a placement here as a place where a person manages the material side of things, tends to logistics, or carries for others what they cannot carry themselves. It is not a glamorous image, and it does not need to be: without it no one arrives.
Lynda Hill calls the degree before a placement its Karmic Condition and the degree after its Quest Degree. Before Taurus 13 comes Taurus 12, people looking into shop windows; after it comes Taurus 14, children playing near shellfish that feel their way along the shore. Read by her rule, what was chosen behind glass has to be carried, and the carrying gives way to a beach where small lives go about their business unburdened. The degree opposite, Scorpio 13, shows an inventor trying things out; as a reading aid it sets experiment with new things beside careful handling of what already exists.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Taurus 12°00′ up to, but not including, Taurus 13°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Taurus 12°42′ reads Taurus 13, and so does one at Taurus 12°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Taurus 14 after Taurus 12°59′, or back into Taurus 12 before Taurus 12°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 13 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Taurus 12, Taurus 14 and Scorpio 13 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 12 and Taurus 14, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Scorpio 13, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Taurus 12°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Taurus 13; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Taurus 12. 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: Practical hands take care of what has to be moved.
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 12: Looking before choosing the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Taurus 14: Innocence beside instinct the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Scorpio 13: Testing the new the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Taurus in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
