The image
A man is suspended above a wide country that runs flat to the horizon. There is no hill under him, no tower and no rope the line mentions; the height is simply given. The image leaves out whether he is afraid or at ease, and whether he means to come down. What it does give is distance: from where he hangs, fields, roads and rivers lie spread out like a map, and nothing on the ground is near enough to touch.
Meaning
The tradition reads a degree image as a symbol, something that may stand for a way of being, never as an event waiting to happen. Our keyword here is Overview, and our keynote says that detachment gives a view of the whole that the ground cannot give. The man has lost his footing and gained a map. One way to read a placement in this degree is as the habit of rising above a situation to see its shape, with the cost that comes with it: from up there, nothing can be handled. The flatness of the land matters as well. With no landmark to fix on, the view is wide rather than deep, a survey rather than a close look.
After Lynda Hill, the neighbouring degrees frame it: the one before is the background a placement comes out of, the one after the way it is heading. Behind lies Cancer 1, the ship that has changed its signals; ahead lies Cancer 3, a man in furs leading a shaggy deer through the cold. Between a change of flags and a slow walk beside a half-tame animal, this degree is the pause in the air when the whole route can be seen. As a reading aid only, the opposite degree, Capricorn 2, shows three windows of stained glass, one of them hit in a bombardment: a view from the ground of something damaged and still standing, set against this view from above of land that is whole and undisturbed.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Cancer 1°00′ up to, but not including, Cancer 2°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Cancer 1°55′ reads Cancer 2, and so does one at Cancer 1°57′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Cancer 3 after Cancer 1°59′, or back into Cancer 1 before Cancer 1°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 2 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Cancer 1, Cancer 3 and Capricorn 2 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
- Cancer 1 and Cancer 3, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Capricorn 2, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Cancer 1°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Cancer 2; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Cancer 1. 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: Detachment gives a view of the whole that the ground cannot give.
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
- Cancer 1: Signals of change the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Cancer 3: Guiding the half-wild the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Capricorn 2: Faith wounded, faith standing the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Cancer in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
