Wild birds of the field lining their nests with down

The image

The picture is a quiet piece of nature. Game birds, the kind that nest on the ground in fields and woods, are working feathers into their nests, softening the hollow where eggs and chicks are going to lie. No hunter appears in the line and no danger is named; the work is simply done ahead of need. The detail of feathers matters: the birds use what they have, sometimes from their own bodies, to make the place warm.

Meaning

Read as a symbol, which is how the tradition reads every degree, the image is about preparing a place before anyone arrives in it. Our keyword is Preparing for the young, and our keynote says that instinct provides comfort and safety for what is to come. The birds are not told to do this; they know. One way to read a placement here is as a care that works ahead of time and without fuss, the instinct to make a room, a household or a project soft enough for what is going to grow in it. The image also carries a quiet cost, since lining a nest takes something from the bird that lines it.

Lynda Hill reads the degrees beside a placement as its context: the one before is where it comes from, which she calls the Karmic Condition, and the one after where it goes, her Quest Degree. Before this one stands Cancer 5, the train striking the motor car, the hardest image in this part of the sign; after it comes Cancer 7, moonlight and two fairies. By her rule the hard meeting gives way to shelter, and shelter in turn opens onto a softer, dreaming world. As a reading aid, the opposite degree, Capricorn 6, shows a dark arch with ten logs at its base: a threshold into the unknown, beside this degree's lit and padded hollow, which is made precisely so that the unknown, when it comes, is met warmly.

In a chart

A planet or point anywhere from Cancer 5°00′ up to, but not including, Cancer 6°00′ takes this degree. The rule is to count the degree a position is in from one, so a Moon at Cancer 5°23′ reads Cancer 6, and so does one at Cancer 5°59′. Close to either edge, a small change in the birth time or the ephemeris moves a placement into the next image: into Cancer 7 after Cancer 5°59′, or back into Cancer 5 before Cancer 5°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 6 carries the image, keyword and keynote above, with Cancer 5, Cancer 7 and Capricorn 6 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 5 and Cancer 7, read beside this degree after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree sourced

Degree opposite

Capricorn 6, 180° away, offered as a reading aid; it is arithmetic, not a rule of Jones's our construction

A position at Cancer 5°00′00″

Our engine, Hill's rule and every calculator we checked read it as Cancer 6; the Sabian Assembly's sunrise page reads it as Cancer 5. 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: Instinct provides comfort and safety for what is to come.

Claims about it

• The image line on this page, or on any site, is Elsie Wheeler's own wording.

  false

  What 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.

• Reading the degree before and the degree after is part of how the zodiac is built, or of Jones's method.

  false

  What the record shows: It is Lynda Hill's practice, and the two names are hers. We show the two degrees with her name.

• Dane Rudhyar's 1973 lines are the Sabian symbols and free to print.

  false

  What 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 5: Collision with the larger force the degree before, which Lynda Hill reads as its background
• Cancer 7: Enchanted feeling the degree after, which Hill reads as where it is heading
• Capricorn 6: Threshold of the unknown the degree opposite, read beside it as a reading aid
• Cancer in the natal chart the sign these thirty degrees belong to