The Sabian Symbol Story

The Sabian Symbols were given birth in San Diego, California, in 1925 by Marc Edmund Jones, a noted American astrologer and spiritualist and the gifted clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler. Marc Edmund Jones was interested to find a set of degree symbols (a symbol for every degree of the zodiac), that was less judgmental and more of a reflection of contemporary American life than the degree symbols that were currently available. Elsie Wheeler was an extraordinary clairvoyant, crippled by arthritis for most of her life, with a remarkable ability to "see" symbols. Dane Rudhyar acknowledged this as being true of many clairvoyants of this type, but "she... proved to have the ability to a spectacular degree." The degrees were manifested one day in 1925 in San Diego's Balboa Park. Unfortunately, the date was apparently not recorded. Marc Edmund Jones took Miss Wheeler to Balboa Park in his car, where they worked all day. They deliberately found a place in the park very close to a busy intersection where they would be surrounded by the vibrations of modern American life. Jones used a set of 360 cardboard cards, these were blank except for a small notation of the sign and degree. He would shuffle the cards and place a card in front of her, neither of them knowing the degree or sign on the card and she would describe a scene and Jones would write it on the back of the card, hence it was done completely at random. The set of 360 degree symbols was done in one day, a truly extraordinary feat. In the 1930's, Jones' students of the Sabian Assembly started using the Symbols and found amazing results from placing them in natal charts. Dane Rudhyar heard about their extraordinary ability to describe a person's destiny and applied for and received permission to use the Symbols in his book The Astrology of Personality (first published in 1936). In this book Rudhyar did a concise, 3 line interpretation. In 1953, Jones wrote his book The Sabian Symbols in Astrology, describing them in terms of sign polarity and giving them both a positive and negative interpretation and illustrated the applications of the Symbols by relating them to horoscopes of 1,000 well- known people. Twenty years later, in 1973, after a lot of research and investigation into the complete structure of the 360 degree series, Rudhyar wrote An Astrological Mandala. This book gave them an incredible new layer of meaning, Rudhyar employing a more holistic and humanistic approach, promoted the idea of using the Sabian Symbols as a oracle. He described them as a "... contemporary American I Ching.".