Virgo 4° (3° to 4°)
Sabian Symbol: Black and white children play together happily
Symbol wording: Dane Rudhyar, An Astrological Mandala (1973)
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The Essence
- Difference need not be converted into hierarchy, threat, or a reason for exclusion.
- Freedom from a culture's particular biases is a precondition for spiritual development, not merely a nicety.
- The effortless ease with difference that children show is worth recovering deliberately as an adult.
- Prejudice functions as a psychological contraction, a failure of adaptability rather than only a moral failing.
- Diversity of human experience and background is a resource rather than a problem requiring correction.
- Service depends on meeting whoever is present, not the fearful category someone has been assigned to.
- Comfortable intimacy among people already alike is one thing; a richer intimacy exists across difference.
- Subtle, unconscious forms of distance can persist long after obvious prejudice has been addressed.
- A vision of human fellowship across difference is not naive sentiment; it can be what sits beneath the fear.
- What another person brings that you lack and could not generate alone is a gift rather than a threat.
The Image
Black and white children play together happily. Picture a patch of ground somewhere ordinary: the edge of a park, a courtyard behind a block of flats, a beach where two families have put their towels down a few metres apart. Two children have found each other there, one Black and one white, and neither of them has stopped to make anything of it. They are busy with a game whose rules change every three minutes, a stick that has become a sword, and a hole in the sand that must be dug deeper before the tide comes in.
What the scene shows us is mostly an absence. Nobody in it is negotiating, and nobody is being tolerant, generous or brave. The children are doing what children do when they have not yet been handed a reason to hold back, which is to treat another child as a playmate first and everything else later, if at all. The colour of a friend's skin registers the way the colour of their jumper registers: noticed, perhaps commented on, and then folded back into the game.
We should be careful here, because this is not a tale in which children are innocent and adults are corrupt. Children notice difference early, and they absorb the rules of the room fast. The point the image makes is narrower and more useful to us. Distance between groups is taught, and it reaches us through what the adults around us say, what they avoid saying, where they sit and whom they invite home. If we learned it, then it lives in us as a habit, and habits can be seen.
Think of a parents' evening at a primary school. The children run between the tables, mixing freely, while the parents stand in small clusters that sort themselves, without anyone deciding it, by language, by background and by who already knows whom. Nothing hostile happens all evening. And yet you can watch two kinds of social life unfolding in the same hall, and only one of them is relaxed.
Jones gave this degree the keyword intimacy, and the choice deserves a moment. He did not choose tolerance or equality, which are civic words we use about laws and institutions. Intimacy is closer and warmer than either: it means being near enough to someone that their reality reaches you directly, without a category standing between the two of you. Play is one of the first places we learn it, because a game only works when both players are present to each other.
Structurally, Virgo 4° is stage four of the thirty-first five-fold sequence and phase 154 of the cycle. The fourth stage of a sequence tends to take what has been built and test it in contact with other people. In Virgo, the sign of practical service and careful discrimination, that test has a sharp edge: can our talent for telling things apart serve life, or will it harden into a habit of ranking the people we meet?
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The Archetype
The archetype at work here is the playmate, the one who meets you before any story about you has been told. Most of us remember a version of this person. It might have been a cousin, a neighbour, or a child from the next street whose house smelled different from ours and whose parents spoke another language at dinner. The difference was interesting to us then, and it did not yet mean anything.
Virgo is the sign of sorting. It separates the useful from the useless, the nourishing from the harmful, the grain from the husk left behind on the threshing floor. That is a gift, and a great deal of good work depends on it, from a nurse reading a chart to an editor cutting a paragraph. But the sorting instinct has a shadow. Turned on people, it produces hierarchy, and hierarchy dressed up as discernment has proved one of the most durable forms of harm we know. This degree asks Virgo to keep its precision and to let go of the ranking.
The archetype also carries a quieter message about the nervous system. Prejudice is a moral error, and it is also a contraction, a narrowing of the field much like the way a body tightens before a threat. When we meet someone unfamiliar and feel ourselves pull back slightly, the body is running an old programme in which unknown means unsafe. Children at play have not yet installed that programme fully, and you can often see the difference in how loosely they hold their shoulders.
So the playmate is also a teacher of adaptability. To play with someone unlike you, you have to adjust your rules, learn their words for things, and laugh at what you did not expect. A rigid child cannot manage it, and neither can a rigid adult, however sincere their views.
Expressed well, the archetype gives a person an unforced ease with others that makes rooms feel safer for everyone in them. You meet the person in front of you, not the label pinned to their coat. Expressed poorly, the same theme turns into a display of openness that never reaches the body: the right opinions held at a careful distance, and friendship worn as a statement rather than enjoyed as a pleasure. What separates the two versions is whether anyone is playing.
The Taoist Current
Chapter 2 of the Dao De Jing observes that once people fix an idea of beauty, ugliness appears beside it, and once they fix an idea of goodness, its opposite is born alongside. Long and short, high and low, front and back all define each other. The chapter does not claim that differences are unreal. It says that the values we pin to them are relative, and that each side leans on the other. A child at play has not yet attached a ranking to darker and lighter skin, while the adult often has, and believes the ranking is a fact about the world.
Chapter 16 asks us to reach emptiness and keep to stillness, to watch the ten thousand things arise and then return to their root. From that stillness comes a knowing of what is constant, and the chapter says that knowing the constant makes a person open and inclusive, and that inclusiveness leads to impartiality. You can read this as a description of what happens in your own body when fear settles. The body stops bracing, and others stop looking like threats and start looking like what they are: fellow beings rising and returning as we do.
Chapter 49 says that the sage has no fixed mind and takes the mind of the people as their own. The sage is good to those who are good and also to those who are not, and in this way goodness is gained. In a line that suits this degree well, the sage treats everyone as their own children. You do not choose which children are yours according to colour; you look after the ones in front of you.
The Yi Jing Resonance
Hexagram 13, Tong Ren (Fellowship with Men) places heaven above fire. The flame rises toward the sky, and the two share a direction. The judgment speaks of fellowship in the open, out in the meadow where everyone can see it, rather than behind the walls of a clan. In the lines of this hexagram, fellowship that only includes our own family or faction is a narrower and lesser thing. The children in the symbol are playing in the open in exactly this sense, and their bond belongs to no faction.
Hexagram 7, Shi (The Army) is its structural opposite, since every line of the one is reversed in the other. Tong Ren has a single yielding line in the second place among strong lines, and Shi has a single strong line in the second place among yielding ones. Shi pictures water hidden under the earth: a mass of people organised for conflict, held together by discipline and a commander. It is the image of a group defined by its enemy.
Set side by side, the two hexagrams show you the choice in this degree. People can gather as an army, bound by a shared opponent, or as a fellowship, bound by a shared openness. The same human need for belonging drives both, and what changes is whether the group needs someone outside it in order to exist.
The Philosophical Content
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke and wrote often about what he called the beloved community. He did not mean a vague mood of goodwill. He meant the goal toward which the civil rights movement was working: a society in which reconciliation had replaced segregation and enmity, and in which former opponents could live together as neighbours. For King, the aim of nonviolent resistance was not to humiliate or defeat the opponent but to win their friendship and understanding. Beloved community was the end, and nonviolence was the means fitted to it.
Most of us know the passage in his 1963 speech in Washington where he hoped that Black and white children in Alabama would one day join hands as sisters and brothers. It is easy to treat that image as sentimental, and that would be a misreading. King set it beside an unsparing account of unjust laws, violence and economic exclusion. The children holding hands were not a decoration on the argument; they were the measure of whether the argument had succeeded. This degree places that measure at its centre, and invites you to measure your own life by it.
King also warned, in his letter from Birmingham jail, about the moderate who prefers order to justice and the absence of tension to the presence of fairness. That warning speaks to the subtler forms of distance this degree asks us to notice in ourselves. We can hold no hostile opinion at all and still keep our lives arranged so that difference never comes close.
Martha Nussbaum offers a second way in. In Poetic Justice and Cultivating Humanity, she argues that what she calls the narrative imagination is a capacity citizens need: the ability to picture what it would be like to be someone different from yourself, to follow their story from the inside and to understand their emotions and wishes. She sees literature and the humanities as training grounds for it, because a novel puts you inside a life you would never have lived.
In later work such as Hiding from Humanity, Nussbaum examines how disgust gets projected onto groups of people, marking them as contaminating so that others can feel clean. That analysis fits the idea of prejudice as contraction, where the recoil comes first and the justification is assembled afterwards. Narrative imagination works against the recoil, because it is hard to keep someone at a distance once you have lived inside their story for three hundred pages.
Put together, King and Nussbaum describe the two halves of what this degree asks of us: a vision of shared life worth working toward, and an inner discipline of imagination that makes it possible.
The Evolutionary Astrology Lens
In evolutionary astrology, a planet or point at Virgo 4° marks a soul learning intimacy across difference. The lesson is not about holding correct views, which many of us manage easily. It is about whether the body can relax in the company of people who are not like you.
Pluto, the deepest layer of the chart, describes where we have sought security and what we have clung to in order to feel safe. With this degree emphasised, the old security may have come from belonging to a group defined partly by who was kept out of it, whether a family, a religion, a class or a nation. The soul learned that safety meant sameness, and Pluto now asks it to examine what that belief has cost.
The South Node shows the familiar pattern the person falls back on under pressure. Here it tends to be the comfort of the in-group: the same accents, the same jokes, the same assumptions left unspoken around the table. It feels like intimacy, and in a way it is, but it is the intimacy of people who never had to cross anything to reach each other.
The North Node points toward the richer version. It asks the person to put themselves in rooms where they are not the majority, to make friends who will change their view of the world, and to notice the small reflexes of distance that remain after the obvious prejudices have been dropped. Pluto's polarity point, the sign and house opposite natal Pluto, shows where in daily life this softening can take root and become ordinary.
None of this has to feel heavy. Once the fear lifts, the North Node here often feels like play. What you are moving toward is not a duty imposed from outside but a wider circle of people with whom you can be at ease, and who can be at ease with you.
The Buddhist Dimension
The Buddha placed great weight on kalyana-mitta, admirable friendship. In one discourse, his attendant Ananda suggests that good friendship is half of the holy life, and the Buddha corrects him: it is the whole of it. A good friend is someone whose presence makes us more honest, more patient and more awake. Such friends rarely come only from inside our own comfortable circle, and often they are the people who see what we cannot, precisely because they stand somewhere else and have lived through what we have not.
Metta, loving-kindness, is trained in a particular order. The practitioner begins with themselves and then moves to a benefactor, a dear friend, a neutral person, someone difficult, and finally all beings without distinction. The neutral person is the interesting step, because it is the stranger on the bus or the shopkeeper whose name we never learned. Metta practice asks us to see that this stranger wants to be happy and safe exactly as we do. Over months and years of practice, the category of stranger grows thinner, and the people inside it start to come into focus as individuals.
The children in the symbol have a kind of untrained metta. They wish each other well because the game is fun and because nothing has taught them otherwise. The adult practice is a way of recovering that ease on purpose and with open eyes, knowing what fear looks like in our own bodies and choosing, each time it rises, not to obey it.
The Soul's Work
The work of this degree begins with noticing, and not only the obvious prejudices, which most of us have already examined. It is the quieter ones that matter here. Whose name do you mispronounce and never ask about? Whose opinion do you discount slightly before they have finished speaking? Which neighbourhood do you avoid without a reason you could say out loud?
Keep a short record for a week. You are not collecting evidence against yourself; you are mapping where your body contracts. You might notice a small tightening when someone with an unfamiliar accent sits beside you on a train, or a reflex to explain yourself more slowly to certain people than to others. Write each moment down without commentary, because plain awareness does most of the work.
Then add one small act of approach each week. Learn the name of the person who cleans your office and use it. Read a novel written by someone whose life is far from yours, and stay with it to the end even when it unsettles you. Accept an invitation you would normally decline because you would not know anyone there. At the next parents' evening, or the next gathering where the room sorts itself, go and sit at the other table.
For Virgo there is also a practical dimension of service. If you work in health, education or any helping role, notice whether you offer the same warmth to every person who comes through your door. Service means meeting whoever is present, not the category someone has filed them under before they arrived.
None of us will become a child again, and that is not the aim. The aim is a grown, chosen version of the ease the children in this symbol have by default: an ease that has looked fear in the face and decided that the game is more interesting.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Sabian Symbol for Virgo 4°?
The Sabian Symbol for Virgo 4° is Black and white children play together happily, in the wording Dane Rudhyar gave it in An Astrological Mandala (1973). The image itself was channelled by Elsie Wheeler in 1925 and first recorded by Marc Edmund Jones. It is phase 154 of the 360-degree cycle, the fourth stage of the 31st five-fold sequence. Jones's keyword is intimacy.
What does Virgo 4° mean in a natal chart?
A planet at Virgo 4° points to someone learning to meet people across lines of colour, culture or class without the habit of ranking them. The person may have grown up inside a narrow circle and feel drawn, often slowly, toward a wider one. Their gift, once developed, is an ease that helps others relax. Their test is to let that ease reach the body as well as their opinions.
What is the keyword for Virgo 4°?
The keyword Marc Edmund Jones assigned is INTIMACY. At its best it describes warm, direct closeness with others that does not depend on them being like you, the kind of contact that leaves both people more fully themselves. At its worst it narrows into the cosy closeness of people who already agree, or into a polite familiarity that never lets anyone come near.
Why is this symbol set specifically with children?
Children have not yet fully absorbed the social maps that adults carry. They notice difference, but they have not yet learned what their culture says it should mean. Setting the scene with children shows that distance between groups is acquired. The symbol does not ask adults to become naive; it asks us to recover deliberately the ease that children have by default, with everything we now know.
What is the shadow side of Virgo 4°?
The shadow is Virgo's sorting instinct turned on people. It can show up as quiet ranking, as discomfort with anyone outside the familiar circle, or as a performance of openness that never becomes friendship. Another form is believing the work is done because the obvious prejudices have gone, while subtle habits of distance carry on unseen in where we sit and whom we trust.
How does this degree connect to Virgo's work of service?
Virgo serves through attention to the particular. Good service means seeing the actual person in front of you, with their history and needs, rather than a category. If prejudice filters who receives your full care, the service is compromised at its root. This degree asks Virgo to clear that filter so that its skill and devotion can reach everyone who comes to it.
How does MLK's vision of beloved community relate to this degree?
King's beloved community was a society reconciled across the lines that had divided it, where former opponents could live as neighbours. He hoped Black and white children would one day hold hands as sisters and brothers, and he treated that hope as a test of whether justice had arrived. This degree pictures the test already passed, in a single game on ordinary ground.
How does Nussbaum's concept of narrative empathy apply here?
Nussbaum argues that imagining the inner life of someone unlike yourself is a skill, trained through stories, literature and attention. It works against the recoil on which prejudice relies. Applied to this degree, it is the adult route back to what the children have naturally: a sense that the other person carries a story as full as your own, and is worth getting to know.
This interpretation draws on the 360 symbolic images channelled by Elsie Wheeler in 1925, as recorded and organised by Marc Edmund Jones and later developed by Dane Rudhyar in Astrological Mandala (1973), read here through the lens of depth psychology, Eastern philosophy, and evolutionary astrology.
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