The image
The image is a cafeteria where diners take a tray and choose for themselves from dishes laid out along a counter. It is a place built for speed and for choice. The picture shows the arrangement, not the people: food set out in rows, waiting to be picked. The picture comes from a single day's sitting in San Diego in 1925, the day Wheeler and Jones recorded Gemini 20.
Meaning
Read as a symbol, the cafeteria is abundance that requires decisions. Everything is available, but no one serves; each person has to choose, and the range can be a pleasure or a burden. Our keyword is Plentiful choice, and our keynote reads it in one line: many sources are laid out at once, and one must choose. The tradition would read a placement here as a place where a person faces many options, ideas or sources of information at once and learns to select, or enjoys the variety for its own sake. The image is ordinary and modern, and that suits a sign of quick exchanges.
Lynda Hill reads the degree before as the Karmic Condition and the degree after as the Quest Degree. Gemini 19, before it, is a huge book from long ago; Gemini 21, after it, is workers marching in a demonstration. By her rule one great store of knowledge gives way to many small dishes to choose from, and individual choice looks ahead to many people acting as one. The degree opposite, Sagittarius 20, shows workers sawing through ice; as a reading aid it sets hard labour to cut out what is needed beside a counter where everything is ready.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Gemini 19°00′ up to, but not including, Gemini 20°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Gemini 19°31′ reads Gemini 20, and so does one at Gemini 19°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Gemini 21 after Gemini 19°59′, or back into Gemini 19 before Gemini 19°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 20 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Gemini 19, Gemini 21 and Sagittarius 20 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 19 and Gemini 21, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Sagittarius 20, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Gemini 19°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Gemini 20; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Gemini 19. 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: Many sources are laid out at once, and one must choose.
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 19: Preserved knowledge the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Gemini 21: Mass pressure the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Sagittarius 20: Cutting the ice the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Gemini in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
