The image
The image is a man of Spain serenading the woman he loves, singing below her balcony or window, perhaps with a guitar. The picture holds the old forms of courtship: the evening, the song, the distance between the singer in the street and the listener above. Whether she answers is not shown. The picture comes from a single day's sitting in San Diego in 1925, the day Wheeler and Jones recorded Taurus 26.
Meaning
Read as a symbol, the serenade is feeling expressed through a tradition. The singer does not simply speak his heart; he uses a song, a time and a setting that his culture provides, and the form gives the feeling its grace. Our keyword is Courtship as art, and our keynote reads it in one line: feeling is offered through form, music and tradition. In a chart the tradition would read a placement here as a place where a person expresses affection with style, through craft or ritual, and where how something is offered matters as much as what is felt. The image ends with the song; the reply is not part of it.
Lynda Hill reads the degree before a placement as its Karmic Condition and the degree after as its Quest Degree. The one before is Taurus 25, a big public park with a stately air; the one after is Taurus 27, a Native woman with beads for sale. By her rule a shared, ordered space narrows to one man's song for one woman, and the song looks ahead to a craft offered in exchange, art given in two different ways. The degree opposite, Scorpio 26, shows a Native people making camp; as a reading aid it sets a community settling for the night beside a single voice reaching up to a window.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Taurus 25°00′ up to, but not including, Taurus 26°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Taurus 25°43′ reads Taurus 26, and so does one at Taurus 25°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Taurus 27 after Taurus 25°59′, or back into Taurus 25 before Taurus 25°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 26 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Taurus 25, Taurus 27 and Scorpio 26 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 25 and Taurus 27, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Scorpio 26, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Taurus 25°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Taurus 26; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Taurus 25. 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: Feeling is offered through form, music and tradition.
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 25: Shared cultivation the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Taurus 27: Heritage for sale the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Scorpio 26: Making camp the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Taurus in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
