Two shoemakers side by side at the bench

The image

The image is a cobbler's workshop: two shoemakers at one bench, with leather, lasts, awls and thread, mending or making shoes. They work in the same space at the same task. Nothing grand happens; the picture is about competent hands and shared labour on things people walk in every day. Of the 360 pictures Elsie Wheeler described in 1925 as Marc Edmund Jones wrote them down, this is Taurus 29.

Meaning

The tradition reads the shoemakers as the dignity of useful work shared. Shoes carry people; making and mending them is modest, necessary and skilled, and doing it together makes the work steadier. Our keyword is Practical partnership, and our keynote reads it in one sentence: skilled, humble work is done side by side, repairing what carries people. In a chart a placement here can be read as a place where a person works well with others on practical tasks, values craft over show, or helps keep others on their feet in a quite literal way. The picture honours small, reliable work.

Lynda Hill calls the degree before a placement its Karmic Condition and the degree after its Quest Degree. Before Taurus 29 comes Taurus 28, a woman courted by a love that comes late; after it comes Taurus 30, a peacock showing off on a lawn of great age. Read by her rule, a renewal of feeling settles into steady shared work, and the work gives way, at the end of Taurus, to splendid display. The degree opposite, Scorpio 29, shows a Native mother pleading with the chief for her children's lives; as a reading aid, and as an image only, it sets an urgent appeal for others beside quiet work done for them.

In a chart

A planet or point anywhere from Taurus 28°00′ up to, but not including, Taurus 29°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Taurus 28°34′ reads Taurus 29, and so does one at Taurus 28°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Taurus 30 after Taurus 28°59′, or back into Taurus 28 before Taurus 28°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 29 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Taurus 28, Taurus 30 and Scorpio 29 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 28 and Taurus 30, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced

Degree opposite

Scorpio 29, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction

A position at Taurus 28°00′00″

Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Taurus 29; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Taurus 28. 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: Skilled, humble work is done side by side, repairing what carries people.

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 28: Late renewal the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
• Taurus 30: Display on old ground the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
• Scorpio 29: Advocacy for the young the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
• Taurus in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to