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Sabian Symbols
During the session, Jones constantly shuffled the index cards and randomly
placed one of them face down before Wheeler. She would then report on the picture
she saw by inward vision. Neither of them knew which degree she was describing.
Jones then took back the index card and quickly wrote down the few words that he
determined to be the essence of the degree from each picture that Wheeler described.
After the session, Jones put the cards away in a trunk and left them there for
several years. He later took them out and typed them in a list that was privately circulated
to his astrological students. The response was so encouraging that, in 1931, he
worked out the mathematical structure he had discovered in them, expanded the
descriptions for each degree, and put the whole thing together in an astrological typescript.
Some time afterward, Dane Rudhyar came across the typescript, recognized the
value of the symbols, and obtained Jones’s permission to modify and include them in
his 1936 book, The Astrology of Personality. The publication of this book brought the
Sabian symbols to first broad public notice.
After some years of reflection, Jones came to the conclusion that he had gone
far afield by expanding the descriptions of the symbols on his original index card notes
in his 1931 typescript. He also felt he had done precisely what he had tried to avoid in
the first place—moralize the symbols. In 1953, he went back to his original notes on
the cards, added a new commentary and formula, and published them in his book, The
Sabian Symbols in Astrology.
Twenty years later, in 1973, Rudhyar reinterpreted his own earlier version of
the Sabian symbols and presented them as a contemporary American I Ching in An
Astrological Mandala: The Cycle of Transformations and its 360 Symbolic Phases.
While the original Sabian symbol descriptions have been modified and reinterpreted
more than a few times by various astrologers, the words written on the index
cards in Balboa Park in 1925 stand as sole authority as to which version of the symbolic
degrees is truly “Sabian.” (The original index cards have been reproduced and included
in the 1998 book, The Sabian Symbols: A Screen of Prophecy by Diana E. Roche.)
The Sabian symbols are most commonly used in astrology to add depth and
dimension to the interpretation of the planets, parts, and cusps in a horoscope and for
chart rectification. They can also be read for the degrees of new and full moons,
moonrise and sunrise, and in horary as well as natal, progressed, and transit charts.
The Sabian symbol for the day, which is used for daily guidance by many astrologers, is
determined by calculating the degree of the sun at sunrise, at the location of the individual.
The symbols can also be used, even by the nonastrologer, in a wide variety of
divinatory techniques. The most common one is to open a Sabian symbols book while
focusing on a question or problem and, without looking, place a finger on the text and
read what is written for that degree.
In order to determine which Sabian symbol to use, it is necessary to consider
both the degree and minute of the planet. The Sabian symbol degrees are numbered 1
through 30 for each sign. There is no 0° reading for any sign in the Sabian symbol system.
The method used by both Jones and Rudhyar was to read the next higher degree
if a planet had reached at least the one minute (1’) mark of a degree. Their reasoning
was that when consideration is given to moving bodies, as in astrological progressions
[586] THE ASTROLOGY BOOK