The image
The picture is a pair of heads, or one head changing: the first round and robust, the image of health and youth, and the second, into which it fades, lean and intellectual. The change is gradual, one shading into the other, as in a dissolving photograph. The image names no person and no age. Of the 360 pictures Elsie Wheeler described in 1925 as Marc Edmund Jones wrote them down, this is Gemini 17.
Meaning
The tradition reads the image as a change of emphasis from the physical to the mental. The force that went into a vigorous presence is taken up into thought, reflection and understanding. Our keyword is From vigour to thought, and our keynote reads it in one sentence: vital energy is gradually transformed into mind. In a chart one way to read a placement here is as a place where a person turns energy toward study, ideas or inner life, or moves over time from doing to thinking. The picture describes a shift of interest, not a change in anyone's condition, and gives no advice about the body.
Lynda Hill calls the degree before its Karmic Condition and the degree after its Quest Degree. Gemini 16, before it, is a suffragist addressing a crowd; Gemini 18, after it, is two men chatting in Chinese. By her rule a public, energetic voice turns inward to thought, and thought returns to the world as a conversation in a shared language. The degree opposite, Sagittarius 17, is Easter worship held at dawn; as a reading aid it sets a rite of renewal at first light beside a slow change from one kind of strength to another.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Gemini 16°00′ up to, but not including, Gemini 17°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Gemini 16°40′ reads Gemini 17, and so does one at Gemini 16°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Gemini 18 after Gemini 16°59′, or back into Gemini 16 before Gemini 16°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 17 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Gemini 16, Gemini 18 and Sagittarius 17 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 16 and Gemini 18, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Sagittarius 17, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Gemini 16°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Gemini 17; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Gemini 16. 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: Vital energy is gradually transformed into mind.
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 16: Speaking out the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Gemini 18: Common language the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Sagittarius 17: Shared renewal the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Gemini in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
