The image
The image is an old-style well: a stone or brick shaft with a winch, a rope and a bucket, or a pump handle worked by hand. It belongs to an earlier way of life, before pipes and taps. The water lies deep and has to be drawn up by effort, but the means are simple and have served many generations.
Meaning
As a symbol, the old well is a source that sustains and is reached by inherited means. The water is there before anyone comes and stays after they go; the well is the way the past found to reach it, and it still works. Our keyword is Ancestral source, and our keynote reads it in one line: what sustains us is drawn, by old means, from a depth older than ourselves. The tradition would read a placement here as a place where a person draws strength from roots, from family, place or tradition, or values old methods that are slower but reliable. The image is homely and unhurried.
After Lynda Hill, the degree before a placement is its Karmic Condition and the degree after its Quest Degree. Before Gemini 7 is Gemini 6, a rig boring down for oil; after it is Gemini 8, industrial workers out on strike. Read by her rule, an industrial drill gives way to a quiet old well, and the well looks ahead to a time when the people who do the work stop it to change its terms. The degree opposite, Sagittarius 7, shows Cupid knocking at a door; as a reading aid it sets love arriving from outside beside sustenance drawn from below.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Gemini 6°00′ up to, but not including, Gemini 7°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Gemini 6°30′ reads Gemini 7, and so does one at Gemini 6°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Gemini 8 after Gemini 6°59′, or back into Gemini 6 before Gemini 6°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 7 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Gemini 6, Gemini 8 and Sagittarius 7 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 6 and Gemini 8, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Sagittarius 7, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Gemini 6°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Gemini 7; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Gemini 6. 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: What sustains us is drawn, by old means, from a depth older than ourselves.
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 6: Tapping hidden resources the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Gemini 8: Collective protest the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Sagittarius 7: Love's approach the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Gemini in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
