The image
The image is a barn cleared for a dance: a fiddle or two, lanterns, a wooden floor and neighbours dancing together. It is the opposite of the formal ball, informal, noisy and open to all who live nearby. A dance like this belongs to the end of a working day or a working season. Jones took the picture down in San Diego in 1925 from Elsie Wheeler's description of the card for Gemini 22.
Meaning
As a symbol, the barn dance is a community celebrating itself. The same people who worked side by side now dance side by side, and the pleasure is simple, physical and shared. Our keyword is Communal joy, and our keynote reads it in one sentence: a community celebrates its work with shared, unpolished festivity. In a chart one way to read a placement here is as a place where a person enjoys belonging to a group, finds release in music and movement, or helps bring people together after effort. Nothing in the picture is refined; its warmth comes from that.
Lynda Hill calls the degree before a placement its Karmic Condition and the degree after its Quest Degree. Gemini 21, before it, is workers marching in a demonstration; Gemini 23, after it, is three young birds in their nest high up in a tree. Read by her rule, collective struggle in the street gives way to collective delight in a barn, and the gathering looks ahead to a sheltered nest where new life grows in safety. The degree opposite, Sagittarius 22, shows a laundry run by a Chinese family; as a reading aid it sets a family's steady work together beside a neighbourhood's play together.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Gemini 21°00′ up to, but not including, Gemini 22°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Gemini 21°45′ reads Gemini 22, and so does one at Gemini 21°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Gemini 23 after Gemini 21°59′, or back into Gemini 21 before Gemini 21°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 22 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Gemini 21, Gemini 23 and Sagittarius 22 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 21 and Gemini 23, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Sagittarius 22, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Gemini 21°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Gemini 22; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Gemini 21. 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: A community celebrates its work with shared, unpolished festivity.
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 21: Mass pressure the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Gemini 23: Sheltered growth the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Sagittarius 22: Humble service the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Gemini in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
