The image
The picture is a ship seen with two flags. One is furled, wrapped round its staff and saying nothing; the other is unfurled and readable from a distance. The line gives no harbour, no crew and no weather, and it does not say which flag is which, so the contrast is the whole subject: a vessel that has put one message away while it shows another.
Meaning
Sabian images are read the way one reads a dream or a card: as pictures that may stand for something. Flags at sea are signals, and a ship that rolls one up and lets another fly is telling anyone who watches that its business has changed. Our keyword for the degree is Signals of change, and our keynote puts it in one sentence: what is put away and what is shown at once say where the voyage stands. Read this way, the image is about a moment when an old message is folded but kept on board and a new one goes up where it can be seen. One way to recognise it in a chart is a placement where the question is less what a person does than what they let others read from them.
The degree sits between two very different pictures. Lynda Hill reads the degree before a placement as its background, which she calls the Karmic Condition, and the degree after as where it is heading, her Quest Degree. Before Cancer 1 comes Gemini 30, bathers shown and judged in public, the last image of Gemini; after it comes Cancer 2, a man hanging in the air above a wide, flat land. By her rule the ship's signals grow out of a world of display and point toward a long, detached view. The degree opposite, Capricorn 1, can be read beside it as a reading aid: a tribal chief insists on being acknowledged, where this ship only shows its colours and leaves the watcher to decide.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Cancer 0°00′ up to, but not including, Cancer 1°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Cancer 0°18′ reads Cancer 1, and so does one at Cancer 0°58′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Cancer 2 after Cancer 0°59′, or back into Gemini 30 before Cancer 0°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 Cancer 1 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Gemini 30, Cancer 2 and Capricorn 1 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 30 and Cancer 2, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Capricorn 1, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Cancer 0°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Cancer 1; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Gemini 30. 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 is put away and what is shown at once say where the voyage stands.
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 30: Display and appraisal the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Cancer 2: Overview the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Capricorn 1: Asking to be seen the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Cancer in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
