The image
The picture is a walk in the Tuileries, the large garden laid out between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde: gravel avenues, clipped trees, statues, basins of water, all in strict, symmetrical order. The image is of strolling, not of any event, and of a garden made for being seen in. In 1925 the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler saw this picture for an unseen card, the one marked Gemini 3.
Meaning
As a symbol, a formal garden is nature brought into a design. Trees, water and paths are arranged so that people can move through them gracefully, and the order of the place shapes the manners of those who walk there. Our keyword is Formal elegance, and our keynote reads it in one line: nature is shaped by culture into a space of public grace. The tradition would read a placement here as a place where a person enjoys refinement, design and civil society, and where style and form are part of how life is lived. The image is about the walk as much as the garden: elegance shown in motion.
Lynda Hill reads the degree before as the Karmic Condition and the degree after as the Quest Degree. Before Gemini 3 comes Gemini 2, Santa Claus filling the stockings unseen; after it comes Gemini 4, mistletoe hung beside holly. Read by her rule, a hidden kindness gives way to a public promenade, and the cultivated garden looks ahead to two plants that carry the memory of a season indoors. The degree opposite, Sagittarius 3, shows a game of chess between two men; as a reading aid it sets order applied to a contest beside order applied to a landscape.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Gemini 2°00′ up to, but not including, Gemini 3°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Gemini 2°02′ reads Gemini 3, and so does one at Gemini 2°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Gemini 4 after Gemini 2°59′, or back into Gemini 2 before Gemini 2°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 Gemini 3 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Gemini 2, Gemini 4 and Sagittarius 3 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
- Gemini 2 and Gemini 4, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Sagittarius 3, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Gemini 2°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Gemini 3; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Gemini 2. 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: Nature is shaped by culture into a space of public grace.
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
- Gemini 2: Unseen generosity the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Gemini 4: Seasonal memory the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Sagittarius 3: Strategic contest the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Gemini in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
