Children at play beside shellfish feeling their way

The image

The picture is a shore or a rock pool. Children are playing, and close by are shellfish, crabs or similar creatures, moving slowly and blindly, feeling their way over sand and stone. The children do not seem to watch them, and the shellfish know nothing of the children. Two scales of life share the same few yards of shore. The picture comes from a single day's sitting in San Diego in 1925, the day Wheeler and Jones recorded Taurus 14.

Meaning

The tradition reads the scene as different levels of life coexisting. The children are absorbed in their games, the shellfish in their slow search for food, and each world goes on without the other, though both depend on the same shore. Our keyword is Innocence beside instinct, and our keynote reads it in one sentence: two levels of life share the same shore without noticing each other. In a chart a placement here could be read as a place where a person lives alongside things they do not see, or where play and instinct run in parallel. The picture asks for nothing except noticing what is there.

Lynda Hill reads the degree before as the Karmic Condition and the degree after as the Quest Degree. Taurus 13, before it, is the man busy with bags and cases; Taurus 15, after it, is a man wrapped up warmly in a jaunty silk hat. By her rule the burden of luggage is set down for the play of a shore, and the shore gives way to someone well protected against the weather. Opposite lies Scorpio 14, workmen up the poles on the telephone lines; as a reading aid it sets people working on the wires that carry messages beside creatures that carry none.

In a chart

A planet or point anywhere from Taurus 13°00′ up to, but not including, Taurus 14°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Taurus 13°19′ reads Taurus 14, and so does one at Taurus 13°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Taurus 15 after Taurus 13°59′, or back into Taurus 13 before Taurus 13°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 14 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Taurus 13, Taurus 15 and Scorpio 14 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 13 and Taurus 15, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced

Degree opposite

Scorpio 14, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction

A position at Taurus 13°00′00″

Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Taurus 14; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Taurus 13. 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: Two levels of life share the same shore without noticing each other.

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

• Taurus 13: Handling the load the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
• Taurus 15: Style in adversity the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
• Scorpio 14: Linking people the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
• Taurus in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to