The image
The image is two winter plants hung together indoors: mistletoe with its pale berries and holly with its dark, spiny leaves and red ones. In European custom both are brought into the house at midwinter, and each carries old associations, the holly of endurance through the cold and the mistletoe of affection. The picture shows the greenery only, not the gathering.
Meaning
The tradition reads the mistletoe and holly as memory carried by objects. They are only plants, but hung up at a certain time of year they bring back past seasons, people and customs, and that feeling is renewed each time. Our keyword is Seasonal memory, and our keynote reads it in one sentence: simple objects carry a whole heritage of feeling back into the present. In a chart one way to read a placement here is as a place where a person keeps customs alive, finds meaning in ritual and decoration, or feels the pull of the past through small, familiar things. The image honours the custom without asking anyone to keep it.
Lynda Hill names the degree before a placement its Karmic Condition and the degree after its Quest Degree. The one before is Gemini 3, a walk through the Tuileries; the one after is Gemini 5, a magazine of radical opinion. By her rule a formal public garden gives way to a few sprigs of greenery in a home, and that hold on custom looks ahead to print that wants to overturn what people accept. Opposite lies Sagittarius 4, a toddler taking first steps; as a reading aid it sets a life just starting beside a custom that is very old.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Gemini 3°00′ up to, but not including, Gemini 4°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Gemini 3°39′ reads Gemini 4, and so does one at Gemini 3°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Gemini 5 after Gemini 3°59′, or back into Gemini 3 before Gemini 3°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 4 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Gemini 3, Gemini 5 and Sagittarius 4 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 3 and Gemini 5, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Sagittarius 4, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Gemini 3°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Gemini 4; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Gemini 3. 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: Simple objects carry a whole heritage of feeling back into the present.
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
- Gemini 3: Formal elegance the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Gemini 5: Agitation for change the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Sagittarius 4: First independence the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Gemini in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
