THE ORIGIN AND HISTORY OF THE SABIAN SYMBOLS

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The Origin and History of

The Sabian Symbols

by

Diana E. Roche

Marc Edmund Jones

(circa 1925)

On some unrecorded date in 1925, the Sabian symbols were brought into

manifestation in the span of a day in Balboa Park, San Diego, California

through the combined efforts of Marc Edmund Jones and Elsie Wheeler. The story

began in 1923 when Marc met Elsie Wheeler. As Marc later described the

occasion, he sponsored Elsie because he admired her spunk. Elsie had a

brilliant and imaginative mind but she was seriously crippled with arthritis

and confined to a wheelchair. "She couldn't turn her head and could barely hold

her hands." At that time Elsie was scared of anything psychic, but within a year

she had become one of Marc's students, joined a spiritualist church and was

making a good living as a medium. She was by her handicap, however, very

limited in general world experience, and that limitation would later determine

her role in bringing through the Sabian symbols, a set of 360 separate and

unique images.

The Early Influence of "Charubel"

At about the same time that Marc met Elsie, he had become interested in the

symbolic astrological degrees of a Welsh seer by the name of John Thomas,

better known as Charubel. Thomas had obtained his degrees psychically for the

basic purpose of helping him rectify the ascendents of horoscopes. Those

degrees were published in Alan Leo's Astrological Manual No. VIIIin 1898 and

again by Aries Press as The Degrees of the Zodiac Symbolisedin 1943. At first,

Marc thought of obtaining permission from Thomas to recast the descriptions of

the symbols so they would have a more general application. Later he decided

that they were too moralized for his purposes, or too "grooved in a single mood

-- no less objectionable than the older identification as good or bad ...." He

wanted to create a more universal set of symbols.

The Mesopotamian Connection

Elsie had mentioned several times that she wanted to do something significant.

As Marc told it, "She was tired with the average run of questions that she got

from her clients. Highly handicapped but happy to use the psychic thing,

disappointed to find the low level on which that held her." He had already

obtained symbolic degrees for playing cards from an experiment with Zoe Wells,

another psychic. He later commented that through his association with Wells he

was "only most instinctively if at all aware of a strange genetic tie of some

sort back into exceptionally early Mesopotamian or even earlier foundations of

human intelligence, into which she more and more pressed me, and with a nascent

scientific skepticism I did not take it all too seriously at the time and so

there was much that slipped away."

Then one day he had a brainstorm and decided to start fresh with the

astrological symbols to see if he could get a series of pictures that would

serve his purpose. He thought of working again with Zoe Wells but, as he put

it, "She had too wide a vocabulary, too wide an experience of things, so what

she got with the playing cards was too generalized, not specific enough." On

the other hand, "Elsie Wheeler had very limited experience and so had to have a

very limited picture." That was what he wanted. Elsie eagerly agreed to work

with him on the project.

The Plan

Marc was certain of how the work had to be done -- "in one fell swoop." He later wrote:

I had to find a place where the conditions would be proper for Elsie Wheeler,

through whose consciousness the laya center in each of the three hundred and

sixty cases could get in a picture or situation with meaning in modern and

common everyday life, for that one of the Brothers who had the age-old and

particular saturation in the true Memphite (earlier Egyptian) schematism from

which the zodiac was derived originally, and myself, supplying the especially

refined cabalistic training needed for the critical interpretation or

rationalization of the relationships at the threshold of a new or atomic age,

and so I located a section of Balboa Park, in San Diego, California, where a

park lane with little traffic was within feet through a fringe of trees of one

of the city's busiest intersections. The whole task had to be completed without

any breaking in of any other living entity or the intrusion of any sort of life

situation, but here we could sit in a parked car attracting no attention, and

yet we were meeting the requirement of natural law itself that this highest of

spiritual tasks be framed in a milieu of the most complete possible intensity

or turmoil of normal human living or business and personal affairs in the

broadest possible intermeshing or superficial conflict.

The Event

Elsie had to be carried and no others could be present, so Marc picked up Elsie

and, alone in his car, they drove to Balboa Park. Some time prior to that day,

Marc had carefully prepared 360 white, unlined, 3" x 5" index cards for the

session by writing one of the astrological degrees on each of the cards.

Because he realized there could be interruptions he decided to break up the

session into quarters. A quarter of the cards were taken at random for each

session and the cards were shuffled continuously during the process. Each card

was placed face down before Elsie and "she reported on the picture she saw by

inward vision." Neither of them knew which degree was being dealt with during

the time she was describing the picture. Marc hurriedly wrote down the brief

description on each card as she described the image. The first session took

approximately two hours. They took a brief break and another ninety symbols

were recorded. "After a drive well into the country, where there was little

chance for any intrusion of alien interest, but an opportunity for a pleasant

and leisurely noon dinner, the sessions were resumed at the same spot in the

park and the other degrees interpreted in a similar fashion."

As Marc later described it, the cards reflect, "the simple few words in which

Elsie Wheeler described the picture that she saw in the fleeting seconds that

she had to describe it and I had to write the notes down." In his book, The

Sabian Symbols in Astrology, Marc explained his part in the project:

The author had three tasks in addition to the physical care of his student

sensitive. These were (1) the shuffling which maintained the immediate

synchronization with the source material, (2) making pencil notations of the

psychic pictures with critical rejection and selection at each point of

progress, and (3) sustaining the ancient mind-matrix which made the whole

procedure possible. The third task had its expression, in terms of any human

experience to be captured in words, through the presence and co-operation on

the invisible side of life of that one of the Brothers (to use the term by

which he would be identified in Theosophy) who has been concerned in every

spiritistic phase of Sabian investigation.

After the entire session had been completed, Marc felt that one of the symbols

seemed wrong and he made a correction by having Elsie do that particular one

over again. In doing so, it occurred to him that he could have cooperation from

the other end, and so he asked Elsie, "Is so-and-so there?" She answered that he

was. He then asked, "What is he doing?" Elsie responded, "Standing with his arms

folded." Marc then said, "Ask him why he didn't correct that." and Elsie

responded, "He says that is up to you." When Marc reflected on this episode

later, he remarked that this was correct because he was in time and space and

the Brother was not.

At another time, Marc mentioned that, during the session with Elsie, "something

destructive got in ... "A large disappointed audience"; An automobile wrecked

by a train" ... that at the time I didn't realize were the destructive sort of

things that I didn't want. And with no sense that it would be possible to

reestablish the connection that I had originally, I decided to leave them but

describe them as inverted or destructive or negative and interpret them in the

same way."

The pictures or images that Elsie Wheeler saw evidently came from many sources.

According to Marc, "Some were directly out of her own experience, or as she

reached out to take them from other minds directly available to her. Some were

beyond her range of comprehension and were impressed upon her consciousness,

and so were received in distorted fashion or with an overlay of detail which

had to be screened out." But his admiration and appreciation of her

contribution was evident. He wrote in his book, "As events have shown, her

total contribution was an exceptional achievement and this one of the author's

volumes is dedicated to her memory, in the hope that it may in time become a

monument to the beauty of her character and the immortal quality of her

ideals."

Early Work on the Sabian Symbols

After the session, Marc put the cards away in a trunk, thinking that this type

of work was too far afield from the kind of scientific work in which he was

interested. He later commented that "when I got all through [with the project]

I discovered the structure [in the Sabian symbols] and worked out all the

interrelations. That was an order that I found there but was not looking for.

That was gratuitous, serendipity."

Because some of his students were concerned about the fact that he had said that

it would not be possible to reestablish the connection he had originally, he

decided to write them up as a typescript for them to use. That version expanded

the description of the images and included a little story or vignette with each

image. The initial response was so encouraging that he worked out the

mathematical structure that he had discovered in them and put the whole thing

together as a mimeographed astrological lesson series entitled Symbolical

Astrology. He later became disenchanted with this version, however, as he felt

he had done precisely what he sought to avoid -- moralize the symbols in terms

of the "white-Anglo-Saxon culture of [his] upbringing." And he became so

disenchanted with that version that he asked his students not to use it.

In preparation for a book publication of the Sabian symbols, Marc created a new

version in 1948, but he felt that the original intuitive force of the initial

descriptions had been lost and so he put the project aside until 1951.

The Sabian Symbols in Astrology

After going back to the original, brief, pencilled descriptions and reworking

the commentary and formula for two years, he published his "official" and last

version of the symbols as The Sabian Symbols in Astrology. In his foreword, he

describes the book as "the fruition, for the present lifetime of its author, of

a project in astrological research which has occupied him for more than three

decades."

He also gives tribute in his book to Dane Rudhyar, saying he, "more than any

other one person, was responsible for the initial popularization of these

degree interpretations, virtually compelling the organization of the project on

a scale sufficient to make publication possible." It was shortly after Marc had

published the 1931 mimeographed version of the Sabian symbols that Rudhyar

became interested in his work. Marc described their association as follows:

The Sabian Symbols happened to fascinate Dane Rudhyar and I gave him permission

to present them in the frame of, in his way today of explaining it, his

different or "special social psychology and abstract philosophy" and in his

abridgment they gave a redoubled indication of their validity. His Astrology of

Personality and articles in the magazines at the time were very largely

responsible for bringing my contribution out in the open or to first broad

public notice. He however has never been a member of the Sabian Assembly or in

any real sense a student of mine, but always has been his own man very

completely, and this makes the current development all the more significant. In

his new book that has just by several days come to my hand from his with a warm

autograph, An Astrological Mandala: The Cycle of Transformations and Its 360

Symbolic Phases, he explains this later contribution of his on the dust jacket

as "A reinterpretation of the Sabian symbols, presenting them as a contemporary

American I CHING." In other words from a different worker in the cosmic vineyard

is a variant establishment of what we identify as the screen of prophecy and one

that under the circumstances is remarkable testimony to the universal Sabian

depth."

The Sabian symbols are a fascinating, powerful and useful set of images for the

astrologer and nonastrologer alike. The images, themselves have been the

subject of quite a number of new commentaries. Indeed, Marc himself wrote "the

Sabian symbols are a fact and they may be examined or employed by anybody who

wishes. They have entered the realm of common reality and become subject to the

universal logic of man's mind." What should be is.

Today

Many students of the Sabian Assembly and others are presently writing and

working on various projects with the Sabian symbols. If you would like more

information on the Sabian symbols or the Sabian Assembly, please send e-mail to

Diana Roche.

Quotations used in this article are from The Sabian Symbols in Astrology. Arden,

Delaware: The Roberts Studio Press, 1953, and from the Fortnightly Field Notes

and Astrology Typescripts of Dr. Marc Edmund Jones, prepared for the students

of the Sabian Assembly.

The 1993 edition of The Sabian Symbols in Astrology can be ordered from:

Aurora Press P.O. Box 573 Santa Fe, NM 87504

or ORDERS CAN BE FAXED WITH CREDIT CARD # AND SIGNATURE TO:

Weiser Books at: (207) 363-5799 TELEPHONE ORDERS: 1-800-423-7087 OUTSIDE U.S. -

207 363 4393 OR E-mail to:weiserbooks (AT) worldnet (DOT) att.net.

©1997 by Diana E. Roche. .

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