The image
The image is a woman, no longer young, being courted by someone who arrives in the later part of her life. The picture keeps to the courtship itself, the attention and the surprise of it. It turns the usual timing of romance around. Jones took the picture down in San Diego in 1925 from Elsie Wheeler's description of the card for Taurus 28.
Meaning
As a symbol, a late love is the return of feeling after a time when it seemed finished. What was thought to belong to youth turns out to be possible again, in a different form and with different knowledge. Our keyword is Late renewal, and our keynote reads it in one line: feeling is reborn after a season thought to be over. The tradition would read a placement here as a place where a person finds that interests, affections or energies can come back later than expected. The image is about renewal as a possibility; it makes no claim that it happens to any reader.
Lynda Hill reads the degree before as the Karmic Condition and the degree after as the Quest Degree. Taurus 27, before it, is the Native woman with beads for sale; Taurus 29, after it, is two shoemakers at their workbench. By her rule a heritage offered to strangers gives way to an intimate, personal renewal, and the renewal leads to the steady partnership of two people working side by side. Opposite lies Scorpio 28, the fairy king drawing near to his realm; as a reading aid it sets a return to a kingdom of the imagination beside a return of feeling in ordinary life.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Taurus 27°00′ up to, but not including, Taurus 28°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Taurus 27°57′ reads Taurus 28, and so does one at Taurus 27°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Taurus 29 after Taurus 27°59′, or back into Taurus 27 before Taurus 27°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 28 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Taurus 27, Taurus 29 and Scorpio 28 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 27 and Taurus 29, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Scorpio 28, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Taurus 27°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Taurus 28; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Taurus 27. 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 reborn after a season thought to be over.
Claims about it
-
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.
-
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.
-
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 27: Heritage for sale the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Taurus 29: Practical partnership the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Scorpio 28: Returning sovereignty the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Taurus in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
