Virgo 9° (8° to 9°)

The Drawing No One Has Made Before

Sabian Symbol: An expressionist painter at work

The Image

He is painting — or drawing, or making marks — and what he is making does not look like what has been made before. This is the point. The expressionist painter is not attempting to reproduce what the eye sees. They are attempting to express something that the conventional forms of representation cannot contain — something felt, something inward, something about the quality of experience rather than its surface appearance.

The futurist drawings of the original symbol title carry a specific charge: the futurists were the artists and thinkers who believed that the new forms of the modern world — speed, machines, dynamism, energy in motion — demanded new forms of artistic expression. The old forms were inadequate to the new reality. So they invented new forms, broke with tradition deliberately, made art that disturbed and provoked and opened new perceptual territory.

Rudhyar attends to the distinction that makes this degree genuinely demanding: there is a great difference between being an origin of development pregnant with futurity, and deliberately sought for originality. The expressionist painter who is genuinely expressing something — genuinely finding the form that the content requires — is in a completely different position from the person who is performing originality, who is being eccentric for the sake of being eccentric, whose defiance of convention is more about the defiance than about what the art contains.

The risk is real: genuine originality may repel rather than attract. The question is whether the expression is genuine enough to be worth the risk.

If Virgo speaks to your soul — its patient intelligence, its discernment, its capacity to distinguish what is genuinely new from what is merely unconventional — carry its energy with you. Explore the Gamla Healing Virgo collection of embroidered caps and hoodies, made for those who know the difference between the origin and the pose.

The Archetype

The thirty-second sequence has traced a precise arc. Virgo 6° was the dynamic merry-go-round — the objective engagement with the life force in its cyclic form. Virgo 7° was the harem — the enforced passivity and its interior development. Virgo 8° was the first dancing lesson — the voluntary submission to the teacher's instruction. And now Virgo 9°: the moment when what was learned from the teacher must be left behind, and the individual must find their own form.

This is the movement from student to artist, from apprentice to creator. And Rudhyar is careful to locate the precise difficulty: the expressionist painter at this fourth stage is still in the transitional zone. The over-self-consciousness of the attempt is still present. The inner conflict — between the received forms and the forms that feel genuinely one's own — is still at work. The catharsis is real, often emotionally charged, sometimes tragic in its overtones.

Jung would read this moment as the specific crisis of individuation at its most acute: the point at which the persona — the social face developed through the Leo journey of demonstration and the Virgo journey of apprenticeship — must be genuinely transcended in favour of the Self's own authentic expression. The expressionist painter is in the painful space between the mask they have learned to wear and the face that is genuinely theirs.

The shadow Jones named is acute: complete and continuous confusion of ideas — the expressionist painter who has rejected tradition without having developed the genuine inner resource that would make the rejection productive, whose anti-conventionality has no genuine content, whose futurist drawings are futurist in the sense of being different but not in the sense of pointing toward anything genuinely new.

The Taoist Current

Chapter 41 of the Tao Te Ching: When a superior man hears of the Tao, he immediately tries to practice it. When an average man hears of the Tao, he believes in it half the time. When an inferior man hears of the Tao, he laughs at it. If there were no laughter, it would not be the Tao.

The expressionist painter's work, when it is genuinely new, will provoke exactly this: the laughter of those who cannot yet see what it is pointing at. This is not evidence that the work is wrong. It is, in Laozi's formulation, one of the reliable signs that the Tao is genuinely present in it. What is truly ahead of its time will always first appear as laughable to those who have not yet arrived where the artist already is.

Chapter 17: The best leaders are those of whom the people say, at the end, "we did it ourselves." The genuinely original artist is like this: the work that is most truly expressive of the individual soul is also the work that releases the creative capacities of others — the challenge to a distinctiveness that becomes, as Jones noted, a trigger for the viewer's own creativity.

The Yi Jing Resonance

The primary hexagram is Hexagram 51 — Zhen (The Arousing / Thunder). Thunder above thunder — the image of the shock that awakens, the sudden, disruptive arrival of what could not be anticipated, the creative force making itself known through disruption rather than through gentle unfolding.

The commentary says: shock brings success. Shock comes — oh, oh! Laughing words — ha, ha! The shock terrifies for a hundred miles, and he does not let fall the sacrificial spoon and chalice. The expressionist painter is this: the shock, the disruption, the oh-oh of the conventional eye encountering the genuinely new — and the artist who, in the midst of all this reaction, does not drop what they are carrying. The sacrificial spoon and chalice are the genuine content of the work, the thing that the work is for. The hundred-mile shock is the reaction of those who are not yet ready to receive it.

The shadow hexagram is Hexagram 57 — Xun (The Gentle / Wind) — the persistent, penetrating quality that enters everywhere without force. This is the complement to the shock of genuine originality: what enters everywhere without force is the work that, over time, genuinely changes the culture it disturbed. The futurist drawing that is genuinely new will eventually penetrate everywhere, gently, because it was pointing at something real.

The Philosophical Content

Nietzsche — through his concept of the Übermensch and his analysis of the artist who creates new values — is the thinker this degree calls for specifically. His concept of the artist as value-creator, the one who does not inherit values but creates them from the full confrontation with what is genuinely true for them, is the expressionist painter's deepest philosophical context.

For Nietzsche, the great danger is not failure to conform to tradition. It is the failure to be genuine — the artist who is performing originality rather than genuinely expressing what their own encounter with existence has produced. The Virgo 9° painter who is worth the risk they are taking is not the one who is most dramatically different from the tradition. It is the one who is most genuinely expressing their own truth, regardless of how that truth relates to the tradition.

The distinction Rudhyar draws — between being an origin of development and seeking originality — is precisely Nietzsche's distinction between the creator and the performer of creation.

Rainer Maria Rilke earned his place here through his Letters to a Young Poet — the most precise and most deeply felt account in the Western tradition of what the aspiring artist must do, which is: stop asking the world for permission, go inward to the most fundamental question of necessity, and determine whether the compulsion to create is genuinely there or whether it is a preference that could be surrendered without genuine loss.

Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? This is the expressionist painter's essential question before putting brush to canvas. The genuine artist answers: yes, and I cannot not. The person seeking originality answers: yes, if it will be well received.

The Evolutionary Astrology Lens

Jeffrey Wolf Green would read Virgo 9° as the soul's evolutionary arrival at the fourth stage of the Virgo sequence — the specific moment in the apprenticeship arc when the authority of the teacher must be internalised and transcended. Virgo 8° showed the child genuinely surrendering to the instructor. Virgo 9° shows what becomes necessary after genuine surrender: the moment when the genuine self must express itself in forms that the teacher cannot provide.

The South Node pattern here often carries the memory of having been afraid of this step — of having remained in the safety of received forms, in the comfort of the teacher's authority, in the security of producing what has already been proven acceptable. The evolutionary challenge is the specific, costly courage of the genuine expressionist: the willingness to find the form that the genuine content requires, even when that form has not yet been seen before, even when the first reaction is laughter or rejection.

The North Node invitation is toward EXPERIMENT — Jones's keyword — understood in its most precise and most demanding sense: not the experiment as entertainment or as the performance of unconventionality, but the experiment as the genuine, risky, necessary reaching toward the form that is adequate to the genuine content.

The Buddhist Dimension

The Buddhist concept of sva-dharma — one's own dharma, the specific path that is genuinely one's own rather than the path that has been assigned by social convention or inherited from the tradition — is the expressionist painter's foundational orientation. The Bhagavad Gita says: better is one's own dharma, though imperfectly performed, than the dharma of another well performed. The futurist drawing, however imperfectly executed, that is genuinely the artist's own, is preferable to the perfect reproduction of a received form that belongs to someone else's vision.

The Buddhist concept of vigour — vīrya, the courageous, sustained energy of genuine practice — includes the specific courage required to maintain the genuine expression against the pressure to conform, to continue making the futurist drawing when the conventional crowd finds it laughable, to trust the inner necessity rather than the external reception.

The Soul's Work

What is the drawing you have not yet made because you are not sure enough that it is good enough?

Virgo 9° is not asking for the perfect original work. It is asking for the experiment — the genuine, risky attempt to express what the genuine content requires, in the form that the content itself demands rather than the form that has already been proven acceptable.

The distinction Rudhyar names is the degree's most essential teaching: the difference between the origin and the originality-seeker. The origin is pregnant with futurity — it has something genuinely new within it that the form is trying to express. The originality-seeker is performing difference for its own sake.

Only you know which one your drawing is. And the way you know is: does the compulsion to make it come from the inside out, from the genuine encounter with what is true for you — or from the outside in, from the desire to be seen as original?

The expressionist painter's work is difficult. The inner conflict is real. The over-self-consciousness is real. The risk of producing what is merely a cathartic expression of personal confusion rather than the thing that was trying to be born — this risk is real.

Make the drawing anyway. The experiment is necessary. The expansion of the human mind depends on the willingness of some people to draw what has not yet been drawn.

Watch where you're pointing that light.

The Virgo collection at Gamla Healing was made for those who are making the drawing — who have gone through the apprenticeship and are now, at genuine personal risk, attempting the form that the genuine content requires. Explore the Virgo collection.

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.

Gamla Healing — bridging the inner and outer world, one degree at a time.