The image
The image is a line of bathing beauties, women in the swimming costumes of the day, presented to an audience and judged on their looks. The setting is a beach or a stage by the sea, and the mood is holiday. The picture shows the display and the judging, not the individuals. Marc Edmund Jones wrote the picture down in San Diego in 1925, as the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler described Gemini 30.
Meaning
Read as a symbol, the beauty parade is form shown and measured by others. The people on display are seen for how they look, and the audience compares and decides. Our keyword is Display and appraisal, and our keynote reads it in one sentence: physical form is shown and judged in public. The tradition would read a placement here as a place where a person's appearance or presentation is on view, where they judge or are judged, or where they have to think about how much of themselves to put on show. The picture belongs to its period; we describe it as an image and do not endorse its judging.
Lynda Hill reads a degree with its Karmic Condition, the degree before, and its Quest Degree, the degree after. The one before is Gemini 29, the year's first mockingbird; the one after is Cancer 1, a ship flying one flag furled and one unfurled, the first image of Cancer. By her rule a single voice heralding a season gives way to many people on show, and the public display looks ahead to signals hoisted and lowered at sea, a different way of being seen. The degree opposite, Sagittarius 30, is the head of the Catholic Church; as a reading aid it sets an office of spiritual authority beside a contest of looks.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Gemini 29°00′ up to, but not including, Gemini 30°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Gemini 29°41′ reads Gemini 30, and so does one at Gemini 29°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Cancer 1 after Gemini 29°59′, or back into Gemini 29 before Gemini 29°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 30 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Gemini 29, Cancer 1 and Sagittarius 30 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 29 and Cancer 1, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Sagittarius 30, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Gemini 29°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Gemini 30; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Gemini 29. 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: Physical form is shown and judged in public.
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 29: Herald of renewal the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Cancer 1: Signals of change the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Sagittarius 30: Spiritual authority the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Gemini in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
