Ride the waves of your imagination back to Balboa Park in San Diego, California, one hundred years ago. The year is 1925. A woman sits in a parked car. She is engaged in an intense private conversation with a man. They are both in their thirties. He draws a 3” x 5” index card at random from a large stack and places it face down. On the card, and unseen by either one of them, is the notation “Aries 4.” An image forms in her mind. She says, two lovers are strolling through a secluded walk. He jots it down, shuffles the cards, and draws another, this one is for “Libra 13.” The woman says, Children blowing soap bubbles.

So it goes. Over several sessions, astrologer Marc Edmund Jones and psychic Elsie May Wheeler covered the entire zodiac. To each degree an evocative image was assigned. Thus began the long, complicated birth of what came eventually to be known as the Sabian Symbols. 

Elsie Wheeler passed away in 1938 at age fifty-one. She had spent her entire life in a wheelchair, suffering from crippling arthritis. As psychics and mediums go, astrologically she looks like the real deal. Here’s her A-rated chart. Note her Moon in the last degree of mystical Pisces along with Neptune conjunct her Ascendant. If anyone was in touch with the Spirit world, it was her.

I found a photo of her by searching online. It’s rights-protected so I can’t share it here without risking getting us into legal trouble. If you’re interested, you can Google it yourself. I don’t know how you will feel, but for me it was love at first sight. Her eyes go back forever. 

For all the usual sad reasons, when people speak of the Sabian Symbols, the name that is generally associated with them is that of astrologer Marc Edmund Jones. Meanwhile, poor Elsie May Wheeler is often forgotten. I want to celebrate her here, especially now that we have reached the one hundredth anniversary of the time she brought these images from the next world into this one. The Sabian Symbols would not exist without her.

None of this is meant to discredit Marc Edmund Jones. The symbols would not exist without him either. He was also one of the most productive and creative of the mid-20th century astrologers, probably best known for his work with aspect patterns – buckets, bowls, see-saws, and so on. 

Jones continued to work with the Sabian Symbols for years after Elsie Wheeler’s passing, changing a few of them, writing little paragraphs of explanation for each of them. He initially published them for his students in mimeographed form. Eventually, astrologer Dane Rudhyar became interested in them too. He published a modified version in his monumental 1936 work, The Astrology of Personality, thus ensuring their place in astrological history. Jones himself published The Sabian Symbols in Astrology in 1953. Twenty years later, Rudhyar devoted an entire book to them. It was called An Astrological Mandala. 

In 2004, Martin Goldsmith published a massive research project about the symbols and actually rejected some of Wheeler’s imagery, replacing it with fresh images that seemed to resonate better with the actual lives of people born with planets in those degrees. His book is titled, The Zodiac By Degrees. I suspect that purists frown on it because of his deletion of some of Wheeler’s images, but I found Goldsmith’s work impressive. For example, the original symbol for my own natal Sun’s position in 16 Capricorn is school grounds filled with boys and girls in gymnasium suits. I’m not an athlete. When I was growing up, gym was mostly about boredom and humiliation. It’s a stretch to make Wheeler’s original image for my Sun’s degree speak to me in a way that I can relate to. Meanwhile, here is Goldsmith’s new wording for that same mid-Capricorn degree: Turbaned guru explains a path to higher awareness, while his assistant walks among the meditating disciples and prods them into the correct posture. 

When I first read those words, I had to laugh out loud. I’m no guru, but obviously Goldsmith’s imagery relates much more obviously to the actual realities of my life than anything about a gymnasium. Reading it put a smile of recognition on my face – and as students and community members in the FCEA, I bet it put smiles on your faces too. I can’t help but think of our team of devoted tutors “prodding you into the correct posture.”   

Again, Martin Goldsmith derived these new images from meticulous biographical studies of the actual lives of people born with planets in these degrees. He only replaced Elsie Wheeler’s originals where it seemed appropriate and necessary.

• By the way, if you are drawn to work with the Sabian Symbols, here is a point that needs to be 100% clear. In working with them, the first degree of Aries starts at 0 Aries and ends at 1 degree of Aries. If, in other words, your natal Mars is in 0 Aries 38’, you read Aries 1, if it’s in 1 Aries 08’, you read Aries 2, and so on. 

WHAT TO MAKE OF THE SABIAN SYMBOLS

So here we are, having arrived at the Centennial of the birth of the Sabian Symbols. It seems appropriate to mark it. Unfortunately no exact date was recorded for when Jones and Wheeler sat together in that park in San Diego. All we know is that it happened over several days in 1925. 

In any case, a hundred years have passed, and all 360 of the symbols are still alive and kicking in one form or another in the world of contemporary astrology. At this point, they’ve been around far too long for anyone to dismiss them as a fad. Still, they’re not actually used very widely – saying that they have a “cult following” is closer to the truth. The sorts of highly intuitive astrologers who might also be drawn to Tarot cards or dream interpretation do well with them. Meanwhile, more linear thinkers tend to shrug their shoulders. But only a fool would reject them entirely. Like astrology itself, give them a chance and they will prove themselves to you.

Australian astrologer Lynda Hill is probably their most prominent current advocate. Her website is fun and impressive: https://sabiansymbols.com. Hit that link, ask a question, click the nebula, and – boom – a Sabian Symbol appears “at random,” often casting light on the question you asked. Obviously, that kind of divinatory process is more like Tarot cards or the I Ching than astrology – but those systems work too.

I’ve played with the Sabian Symbols myself for years. I find them intriguing and delightful. I mean, who can read rabbits in faultless human attire parade with dignity without smiling? That’s Cancer 8, by the way. In the early years of my astrological practice, I occasionally used them with clients, with mixed results. Once again, my more intuitive, Neptunian clients could relate to them more easily than my more “Earth-toned” ones. I no longer use the Sabian symbols in my practice. But I still find them fascinating.

Maybe you will too.