The image
The picture is cold country. A man is bundled in furs against the weather, and beside him, on a lead or simply walking where he walks, goes a deer with a shaggy winter coat. The line does not call the animal tame, and it does not call it wild; it is being led, which means it has agreed, or been persuaded, to go along. Nothing is said about where the two are heading. The furs and the coat answer each other: both creatures are dressed for the same hard climate.
Meaning
Read as the tradition reads its images, the picture is a symbol of a relationship. Our keyword is Guiding the half-wild, and our keynote says that patience and protection lead an untamed creature along. Nothing in the image is forced. The deer is not caged or roped to a post; it walks, and the man walks with it, both of them shaped by the same cold. One way to see a placement here is as the slow work of bringing something skittish into company without breaking its nature, whether that is an animal, a younger person, a feeling or a talent that has not yet been trained. The furs suggest that the guide needs protecting too.
Lynda Hill's practice is to read the degree before a placement as what it starts from and the degree after as what it reaches for. Here the degree before, Cancer 2, is the man suspended over the flat land, seeing everything and touching nothing; the degree after, Cancer 4, is a cat and a mouse in an argument. By her rule the step down from the air to the frozen ground brings closeness with another creature, and the next step tests what happens when two natures cannot agree. The opposite degree, Capricorn 3, offered here as a reading aid, is a soul that is open, ready to grow and to learn: the inner readiness that this patient guide hopes to find in the animal beside him.
In a chart
A planet or point anywhere from Cancer 2°00′ up to, but not including, Cancer 3°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Cancer 2°32′ reads Cancer 3, and so does one at Cancer 2°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Cancer 4 after Cancer 2°59′, or back into Cancer 2 before Cancer 2°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 3 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Cancer 2, Cancer 4 and Capricorn 3 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 2 and Cancer 4, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced
- Degree opposite
- Capricorn 3, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction
- A position at Cancer 2°00′00″
- Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Cancer 3; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Cancer 2. 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: Patience and protection lead an untamed creature along.
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 2: Overview the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
- Cancer 4: Unequal dispute the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
- Capricorn 3: Open spirit the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
- Cancer in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to
