The image
The picture is a drilling rig, a tall frame with its machinery, boring down through rock in search of oil far below. The image shows the work under way, not a strike: the drill turning, the shaft going deeper. What is sought was laid down over ages and lies out of sight. Marc Edmund Jones wrote the picture down in San Diego in 1925, as the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler described Gemini 6.
Meaning
The tradition reads the rig as the search for hidden resources. Energy is stored beneath the surface, and only patient, persistent effort, aimed at one spot and pushed through hard layers, can reach it. Our keyword is Tapping hidden resources, and our keynote reads it in one sentence: effort goes deep to reach a power stored beneath the surface. In a chart a placement here can be read as a place where a person digs into their own capacities or a subject's foundations, often with determination, and draws up what was not visible before. The image is about depth and persistence, and nothing else is read into it.
Lynda Hill reads the degree before and after as the Karmic Condition and the Quest Degree. Gemini 5, before it, is a magazine of radical opinion; Gemini 7, after it, is a well of the traditional kind from older days. By her rule ideas that agitate the surface give way to a machine that goes beneath it, and the modern rig looks ahead to the old way of drawing up what lies below, a bucket in a well. The degree opposite, Sagittarius 6, is a cricket match in progress; as a reading aid it sets a leisurely game on the surface of a green field beside a hard push into the ground.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Gemini 5°00′ up to, but not including, Gemini 6°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Gemini 5°53′ reads Gemini 6, and so does one at Gemini 5°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Gemini 7 after Gemini 5°59′, or back into Gemini 5 before Gemini 5°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 6 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Gemini 5, Gemini 7 and Sagittarius 6 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 5 and Gemini 7, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Sagittarius 6, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Gemini 5°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Gemini 6; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Gemini 5. 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: Effort goes deep to reach a power stored beneath the surface.
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 5: Agitation for change the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Gemini 7: Ancestral source the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Sagittarius 6: Fair play the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Gemini in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
