The image
The picture is a woman of one of the Native nations of North America with beadwork laid out to sell: necklaces or other pieces made in patterns her people have used for generations. The image shows her and her goods, not the buyers. Jones took the picture down in San Diego in 1925 from Elsie Wheeler's description of the card for Taurus 27.
Meaning
The tradition reads the image as the past supporting the present. Skills handed down through a people become a means of living now, and the beadwork carries a heritage into exchange with strangers. Our keyword is Heritage for sale, and our keynote reads it in one sentence: the past supports the present by turning its crafts into exchange. In a chart one way to read a placement here is as a place where a person draws on inherited skills or traditions and offers them to the wider world, with the questions that brings about value and respect. We describe the image with care for the people and the craft it shows, and read it as a symbol, not a portrait of anyone.
Lynda Hill names the degree before its Karmic Condition and the degree after its Quest Degree. Before Taurus 27 is Taurus 26, a Spaniard serenading the woman he loves; after it is Taurus 28, a woman courted by a love that comes late. Read so, a song offered as courtship gives way to a craft offered for sale, and the offering looks ahead to a feeling renewed after its season seemed over. As a reading aid, the degree opposite, Scorpio 27, is a marching army band: a public, uniform music beside this degree's quiet, patterned handwork.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Taurus 26°00′ up to, but not including, Taurus 27°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Taurus 26°20′ reads Taurus 27, and so does one at Taurus 26°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Taurus 28 after Taurus 26°59′, or back into Taurus 26 before Taurus 26°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 27 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Taurus 26, Taurus 28 and Scorpio 27 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 26 and Taurus 28, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Scorpio 27, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Taurus 26°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Taurus 27; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Taurus 26. 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: The past supports the present by turning its crafts into exchange.
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 26: Courtship as art the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Taurus 28: Late renewal the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Scorpio 27: Collective rhythm the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Taurus in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
