The image
The image is a struggle in which one side carries blades and the other carries flames. No armies, place or cause are named; the picture is reduced to the two kinds of instrument. A sword cuts and divides; a torch lights the way and can also burn. The contest is undecided in the image. Of the 360 pictures Elsie Wheeler described in 1925 as Marc Edmund Jones wrote them down, this is Taurus 17.
Meaning
Read as a symbol, the swords stand for force that settles things by cutting, and the torches for force that settles things by showing, by making the dark visible. The image asks which wins, and does not answer. Our keyword is Force versus light, and our keynote reads it in one line: power that cuts contends with power that illuminates. The tradition would read a placement here as a place where a person meets the tension between asserting and understanding, between winning an argument and seeing what is true. The image is about two ways of meeting a problem, not about a fight in anyone's life.
Lynda Hill reads the degree before and the degree after as a placement's Karmic Condition and Quest Degree. The one before is Taurus 16, the old man who cannot make the Mysteries plain; the one after is Taurus 18, where from a window a woman holds out a bag. Read by her rule, knowledge that cannot be spoken turns into a contest of blades and flames, and the contest gives way to a quiet gesture of offering something to the street. The degree opposite, Scorpio 17, is a mother who is also her child's father; as a reading aid it sets two powers held in one person beside two powers fighting each other.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Taurus 16°00′ up to, but not including, Taurus 17°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Taurus 16°10′ reads Taurus 17, and so does one at Taurus 16°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Taurus 18 after Taurus 16°59′, or back into Taurus 16 before Taurus 16°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 17 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Taurus 16, Taurus 18 and Scorpio 17 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 16 and Taurus 18, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Scorpio 17, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Taurus 16°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Taurus 17; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Taurus 16. 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: Power that cuts contends with power that illuminates.
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 16: Wisdom without listeners the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Taurus 18: Holding out the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Scorpio 17: Self-sufficiency the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Taurus in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
