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A modern system · Marc Edmund Jones and Elsie Wheeler, 1925

Sabian Symbols

a picture for every degree of the zodiac

Each placement in your chart takes the image of its degree, from 360 pictures seen in one day in San Diego in 1925.

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Your Sabian symbols are the images of the degrees your planets stand in, each position read in the degree it falls in, counted from one: the sample person's Sun at Capricorn 29°55′ takes Capricorn 30, and the Moon, the Ascendant and every other point take theirs, with an image, keyword and keynote in our words.

Elsie Wheeler described the 360 pictures and Marc Edmund Jones wrote them down in San Diego in 1925 and published them in 1953; the degree before and after are read as Lynda Hill does.

  • Sun · Capricorn 29°55′

    Capricorn 30

    A closed-door meeting of businessmen.

    Closed doors. Plans are made in private, among a few.

  • Moon · Cancer 7°47′

    Cancer 8

    A parade of rabbits wearing clothes.

    Playing at dignity. Simple creatures imitate the forms of a higher order.

  • Ascendant · Leo 21°03′

    Leo 22

    A homing pigeon carrying a message.

    Faithful delivery. A message reaches its destination by instinct and training.

PlacementPositionDegreeKeyword
Midheaven Taurus 13 Handling the load
Mercury Aquarius 11 Quiet revelation
Venus Capricorn 12 Knowledge made visible
Mars Taurus 1 Pure source
Jupiter Taurus 27 Heritage for sale
Saturn Capricorn 8 Domestic joy
Uranus Capricorn 3 Open spirit
Neptune Capricorn 11 Protected abundance
Pluto Scorpio 15 Playing with form
North Node Pisces 6 Disciplined display
South Node Virgo 6 Circular motion
Chiron Cancer 3 Guiding the half-wild

And 5 minor points (the Descendant, the IC, the Vertex, the Part of Fortune and Lilith), shown folded in the full chart.

Figure 1. A sample chart for a fictional person, read as our chart reads it: the Sun, the Moon and the Ascendant first, each with its position, the degree it falls in and our image, keyword and keynote; then the Midheaven, the planets, the nodes and Chiron with their degree and keyword. The Sun at Capricorn 29°55′ reads Capricorn 30. Method: tropical positions from EsoTerrier's ephemeris engine (JPL DE440s); each placement takes the degree it is in, counted from one; True Nodes; Lilith (mean).
On this page
  1. How it works
  2. Origins and history
  3. The 360 degrees
  4. Variants and what we leave out
  5. Myths and disputed claims
  6. Stories and lore
  7. Evidence and criticism
  8. Terms
  9. Sample reading
  10. Sources

How it works

Every placement in a birth chart sits at a position in its sign, written in degrees and minutes. The Sabian chart reads it through the image of the degree it is in, counted from one: anything from 0°00′ to 0°59′ of a sign falls in its 1st degree, 19°42′ in its 20th, 29°06′ in its 30th. Lynda Hill puts the rule as adding one to the whole degrees, Astrowiki numbers the degrees the same way, and every calculator we tested agrees. Counted through the zodiac, the degrees run from Aries 1, the first, to Pisces 30, the 360th.

What the chart shows. You give your birth date, time and place. Our ephemeris engine computes the tropical natal chart, the same positions as our natal chart, and the Sabian chart takes twenty points from it. The Sun, the Moon and the Ascendant come first, as the tradition reads them first; then the Midheaven, Mercury to Pluto, the True North and South Nodes and Chiron; then, folded, the Descendant, the IC, the Vertex, the Part of Fortune and Lilith, the mean lunar apogee, the same point the natal chart shows. Each point carries its exact position ("Gemini 23°54′"), its degree ("Gemini 24", the 24th degree of Gemini), our image, keyword and keynote for that degree, and three more degrees with their images: the degree before and the degree after, which Lynda Hill reads as the placement's background and where it is heading, and the degree opposite, 180° away, offered as a reading aid.

A worked example. For a test birth on 15 June 1990 at 14:30 in Taipei the Sun is at Gemini 23°54′ and so reads Gemini 24; the Moon at Pisces 12°18′ reads Pisces 13; the Ascendant at Libra 29°07′ reads Libra 30; the Midheaven at Leo 0°07′ reads Leo 1. A commercial calculator gave the same fifteen degree numbers. In the sample chart above, the Sun at Capricorn 29°55′ reads Capricorn 30, five minutes of arc short of Aquarius 1. That closeness matters: near a whole degree a small change in the birth time, or a different ephemeris, moves a placement into the neighbouring image, which is why the chart always prints the minute beside the degree.

What was checked. The rule was tested at 26 boundary positions and on 46 births against two independent astronomy libraries and three calculators; the numbering of the 360 lines was checked against the Sabian Assembly's list of Jones's 1953 lines and against a second public list, which agree on every degree.

The words. The 360 images, keywords and keynotes are EsoTerrier's own, written on 10 October 2026 from the 1925 pictures, with the vocabulary of 1925 modernised where it has aged badly. They were checked line by line against Rudhyar's 1973 lines, Jones's 1953 lines and, where we could read it, the 1925 card wording, and reworded on 14 October 2026 wherever they came close.

Origins and history

The images are from 1925; the published text from 1953; almost everything else on the subject is a later layer.

When Who What happened
1887 and 1888 Elsie Wheeler; Marc Edmund Jones Wheeler is born in Norris City, Illinois, on 3 September 1887, arthritic from childhood; Jones in St Louis on 1 October 1888. He comes to astrology in 1913 and writes scenarios for silent films.
1922 and 1923 Jones, New York and Los Angeles Classes at his New York home from December 1922; the study group later called the Sabian Assembly begins in Los Angeles on 17 October 1923, under Manly P. Hall's sponsorship.
A day in 1925 Jones and Wheeler, Balboa Park, San Diego In Jones's parked car, 360 cards marked on the back with a sign and degree are shuffled and laid face down one at a time; Wheeler describes a picture for each, and Jones pencils her words on the card. Four sittings of about ninety cards, all in one day. The date was not recorded.
1927 and 1928 Jones and the Assembly Jones derives "Sabian" from the Hebrew word for hosts; the group adopts the name in January 1928.
1931 Jones, Symbolical Astrology The first write-up, in mimeographed lessons, each degree with a little scene; Jones later withdrew it as moralised.
1936 Dane Rudhyar, The Astrology of Personality An abridged rewording, with Jones's permission: by Jones's own account the book that first brought the symbols to notice.
1938 Elsie Wheeler Dies in San Diego on 26 November, aged 51.
1951 to 1953 Jones, The Sabian Symbols in Astrology After a draft of 1948 was set aside, two years' work from the pencilled cards: a 435-page book giving each degree a symbol, a commentary, a keyword and a positive and a negative reading. Registered 1 July 1953.
1973 Rudhyar, An Astrological Mandala A second rewording, with his own keynote and commentary for each degree and a cyclic structure of his own.
1980 and 1981 Jones Dies on 5 March 1980 at Stanwood, Washington, aged 91. The 1953 book's renewal year, 1981, passes with no renewal in the Copyright Office's records.
1995 to 2004 Lynda Hill With Richard Hill, The Sabian Symbols as an Oracle (1995, expanded 2002) makes the symbols a divination; 360 Degrees of Wisdom (2004) adds her commentary for every degree. She reads each placement beside the degree before and after it.
1998 to 2004 Diana Roche; Robert Blaschke; Blain Bovee Roche first reproduces the pencilled cards (1998); Blaschke reads the arc between two planets as a degree (2000); Bovee publishes a commentary (2004).
2002 Rudhyar's estate An Astrological Mandala renewed: in US copyright to the end of 2068.
October 2026 EsoTerrier Our old 360-line table found to carry 187 of Rudhyar's lines, wrong images on about one degree in ten and some of Hill's wording; rebuilt in our own words and checked line by line.
A black-and-white woodcut of a round star map under the title Imagines coeli meridionales: the circle is cut into twelve sectors by lines from its centre and its rim is marked off in small degree divisions; inside are the southern constellations as figures, among them a sea monster, a hare, two dogs, a ship, a centaur, an altar and a crown; a cardinal's coat of arms at the upper left and two lettered panels at the corners.
Figure 2. Albrecht Dürer's woodcut of the southern half of the sky, Nuremberg, 1515, made with Johann Stabius and Conrad Heinfogel, whom the print names. Its rim is cut into twelve sectors and marked off in degrees: the same ruler of 360 on which each Sabian degree sits. 1515. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0 1.0.

Jones's own account is the only one of the day itself. He said he believed the work needed the noise of a busy city round it, and that he put the cards away in a trunk afterwards, thinking them too far from the scientific astrology he wanted to practise. He also said he had not been looking for any order among the images; only when the set was complete did he find relations between the degrees, which he called a gift of chance.

The 360 degrees

Each degree has its own page: our image, keyword and keynote, how the tradition reads the picture, its neighbours as Lynda Hill reads them, the degree opposite, and where the image comes from. Open a sign to see its thirty degrees.

Aries degrees 1 to 30 of 360

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Taurus degrees 31 to 60 of 360

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Gemini degrees 61 to 90 of 360

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Cancer degrees 91 to 120 of 360

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Leo degrees 121 to 150 of 360

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Virgo degrees 151 to 180 of 360

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Libra degrees 181 to 210 of 360

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Scorpio degrees 211 to 240 of 360

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Sagittarius degrees 241 to 270 of 360

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Capricorn degrees 271 to 300 of 360

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Aquarius degrees 301 to 330 of 360

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Pisces degrees 331 to 360 of 360

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Variants and what we leave out

The symbols circulate in several wordings and with several methods attached. We describe them so you can recognise them, and say what we do.

  • Jones's 1953 wording. The book the Sabian Assembly still uses gives each degree a symbol, a commentary, a keyword and a positive and a negative reading; the Assembly's online oracle serves the symbol and keyword only. We quote none of it, by our own decision, whatever its copyright.
  • The 1925 card wording. The closest thing to Wheeler's words, as Jones pencilled them; first reproduced by Roche in 1998. Some cards differ from the 1953 book, and where they do our line follows the card's picture. Its copyright is unclear, so we use facts and short comparisons only.
  • Rudhyar's 1973 version. A reworded image, a keynote and a commentary per degree, arranged in a cycle of his own. In copyright to 2068; none of it is used, and we do not show where a degree falls in his cycle.
  • Hill's oracle. Her commentary, oracle meanings, keywords and a reversed reading for each degree, and her degree before and after. We use her rule for the two neighbours, with her name, and none of her text.
  • The exact whole degree. A position at exactly 0′ of a degree is read by the Assembly's sunrise page as the degree before, and by Hill, every calculator and our engine as the degree after. A computed chart practically never lands on it.
  • The opposite degree. A software vendor says Jones stressed the degree opposite; his 1953 entries never mention it. We show it as a reading aid only.
  • Oracle use. Drawing a symbol at random, or reading the Sun's degree at sunrise or at a new Moon, is a separate practice; our chart is the natal chart only.
  • Arcs between planets. Blaschke reads the distance between two bodies as a degree; that is his technique, not ours.
  • Other zodiacs. Hill allows the symbols on sidereal, heliocentric and draconic positions; no authority of those systems uses them, and our other charts do not show them.
  • Other sets of degree images. Charubel's and La Volasfera's images of the nineteenth century, and the much older images of the figure below, are different sets, not versions of the Sabian symbols. Not offered.
  • The Mean Node, the osculating Lilith and asteroids. Our nodes are the True Nodes and our Lilith the mean apogee; the alternatives move some placements to a neighbouring degree. Some calculators add Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta and Pholus. Left out.
A detail of a printed page of 1494: two lines of Latin headed In primo gradu arietis, a woodcut ram at the upper right, and below them a square horoscope frame with sign glyphs and numbers round its edge and, in the middle, a small woodcut of a man walking with a sickle in one hand and a crossbow over his shoulder.
Figure 3. The first degree of Aries in Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium planum, Venice, 1494: a man with a sickle and a crossbow. Astrologers kept sets of degree images long before 1925; this one is a different set from the Sabian symbols, as its first picture shows. The page's Latin forecasts are not translated here. 1494. National Library of Medicine, Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Myths and disputed claims

What is said about the symbols, who says it, and what the record shows. The label is ours. Six more are recorded in our research: that the system's name is a registered trade mark (false: no register holds it, and the live SABIAN marks belong to a cymbal maker and a water-treatment firm), Jones's Hebrew etymology for the name (his own, unverified), the Harranians as a people of alchemists going back to the third millennium BC (unverified), that the symbols were long kept from ordinary readers by hard arithmetic (false, marketing), Jones's belief that the Sumerians came from Atlantis (legend), and famous birth charts said to confirm particular images (unverified, and picked after the fact).

  • The symbol texts on a site "preserve the absolute integrity" of Elsie Wheeler's visions: what sites print as the Sabian symbols is her own wording.

    false

    Who says it: Our own old page, the retired page writer's file, and most calculator sites, which print Rudhyar's 1973 lines.

    What the record shows: Her words survive only as Jones's pencilled notes, some hard to read. Jones reworded them in 1931 and 1953, Rudhyar in 1936 and 1973, Hill in her books. Our lines are our own after the 1925 images, and say so.

  • The images were received clairvoyantly: Wheeler saw each one with inner vision, and neither she nor Jones knew which degree was on the card.

    unverified

    Who says it: Jones's account, and every retelling since.

    What the record shows: The method as Jones described it. What Wheeler experienced cannot be checked; we describe the session and make no claim about where the images came from.

  • An unseen Brother of an ancient brotherhood stood by the car and helped with the session.

    told as lore

    Who says it: Jones's own account, retold by Roche, Hill and others.

    What the record shows: Jones's belief and his story, told here as his. It is not the source of the images.

  • The session ran for about eight hours, one symbol every 80 to 90 seconds.

    unverified

    Who says it: Lynda Hill's arithmetic, copied by our retired page writer.

    What the record shows: The accounts give the first sitting as about two hours and the second as ninety minutes, the rest after lunch; nobody recorded the total. We say one day, four sittings of ninety cards.

  • In 830 the caliph al-Ma'mun ordered the pagans of Harran to convert, and they took the name Sabians from the Quran to be spared.

    told as lore

    Who says it: Ibn al-Nadim's Fihrist, written about a century later, and many retellings.

    What the record shows: Historians treat the story as a foundation narrative, in all probability untrue. We say only that Jones named his group after the Harranians.

  • Roman edicts destroyed the pagan temples in 389 and 529, and Harran's last temple fell to the Tartars in 1032.

    false

    Who says it: The retired page writer's file and Lynda Hill's site.

    What the record shows: The Theodosian decrees are of 391 and 392, and 529 is the closing of the Athenian school. The Harranian temple was seized in 1031 and gone by about 1081.

  • The degree before and the degree after are part of the wheel's built-in structure, computed by our engine as an evolutionary triad.

    false

    Who says it: Our own old page, without naming its source.

    What the record shows: It is Lynda Hill's practice, and the names Karmic Condition and Quest Degree are hers. We show the two degrees with her name.

  • Reading the arc between two planets as a Sabian degree is part of our method and a standard technique.

    false

    Who says it: Our own old page.

    What the record shows: It is Robert P. Blaschke's technique, from his book of 2000. We do not compute it.

  • Jones's 1953 book is in the public domain in the United States.

    unverified

    Who says it: Our own inference from the Copyright Office's records.

    What the record shows: No renewal appears where one would have to be, which supports it, and abroad the text may be protected to 2050. We quote none of it either way.

  • Dane Rudhyar's 1973 lines are the Sabian symbols and free to print.

    false

    Who says it: Calculator sites and lists that print his wording, and our own old table.

    What the record shows: They are his rewording, with his keynotes and commentary, renewed in 2002 and in US copyright to the end of 2068. We print none of them.

  • The wording of each symbol is settled: Jones's 1953 lines are what Wheeler said.

    disputed

    Who says it: Implied wherever the 1953 lines are called the original.

    What the record shows: The pencilled cards are sometimes hard to read, Wheeler changed some phrases during the session and Jones changed some lines for 1953: one card reads white geese where the book has wild geese.

  • A position at an exact whole degree belongs to that degree's image, not the next.

    disputed

    Who says it: The Sabian Assembly's sunrise page.

    What the record shows: Hill's own rule and every calculator we tested put it in the next degree, as our engine does. A computed position practically never lands on a whole degree.

  • Our old 360-line table gave every degree its own image.

    false

    Who says it: Our engine and pages before 10 October 2026.

    What the record shows: Seven degrees carried another degree's image, twelve carried images that are not Sabian symbols, and two were duplicates. Fixed on 10 October 2026.

  • The symbols are purely descriptive and work as a projective test of the psyche.

    unverified

    Who says it: Astrograph, Hill, and our own old page.

    What the record shows: A fair account of how the tradition uses them, and our stance too; but no study supports the psychological claim. We read the images as symbols and claim nothing more.

Stories and lore

These are told as the tradition tells them.

The day in the park. Jones fetched Wheeler, who could not leave her wheelchair, from her home and drove to Balboa Park, parking where a screen of trees hid the car from a busy road. He shuffled the cards, laid each one face down and wrote in pencil as she spoke: ninety cards in about two hours, ninety more in an hour and a half, then a drive and lunch, and the last two sittings in the afternoon.

The Brother. Jones believed that an unseen member of an ancient brotherhood stood by the car with his arms folded. When he sensed a mistake in one image and asked why the Brother had not put it right, Wheeler passed on the answer that it was up to Jones.

The Sabians of Harran. Jones named his group after the star-centred pagans of Harran in upper Mesopotamia, whose astral religion outlasted several empires. From them came Thabit ibn Qurra, who led the pagans of Baghdad and commented on Euclid and Ptolemy, and al-Battani, whose tables of fifty years' observations Copernicus cited. How they came by the name is a medieval anecdote; their temple was seized in 1031 and gone some fifty years later. Jones also believed Wheeler was in touch with the astrologers of Chaldea.

The moralised version. Jones grew to dislike his 1931 write-up for moralising the images in the terms of the culture he had grown up in, asked his students to drop it, and went back to the pencilled cards for the 1953 book.

The metaphysician and the clinician. Jones brought Rudhyar to astrology through his mimeographed lessons, let him publish an abridgement in 1936, and welcomed the 1973 book as a variant of the same work. Asked to compare them, Jones called Rudhyar the metaphysician and himself the clinician.

Anybody who wishes. Jones held, as the Assembly records it, that the symbols are a fact, part of common reality, which anyone who wishes may examine and use.

Evidence and criticism

No study. We know of no empirical test of degree symbols. The standard review of about a thousand studies of astrology (Dean and others, 2022) finds effects near zero for signs, chart matching and the other tests it covers, and does not mention the Sabian symbols. The tradition itself calls them descriptive, not predictive.

What can be checked is the mapping. The degree rule is a definition, and our implementation agrees with two independent ephemeris computations and three calculators. The one real hazard is a position within a few seconds of arc of a whole degree, where two ephemerides can disagree by one image.

The text problem. The symbols have no single text. Wheeler's words survive only as Jones's pencilled notes, some hard to read; Jones reworded them twice, Rudhyar twice and Hill once, and sites print whichever version they have as "the Sabian symbols". Our own old table mixed three of those layers and carried the wrong image on about one degree in ten.

The tradition's own criticism. Jones's rejection of his 1931 commentary as moralised is the earliest criticism of the symbols from inside, and the reason the 1953 lines are the ones his organisation uses. Rudhyar's cycle is his own reading laid over the set: Jones welcomed it as a variant, and the Assembly's oracle serves image and keyword with no commentary at all, on purpose.

Our own record. Until 10 October 2026 our chart printed 187 of Rudhyar's lines as the symbols, put the wrong image on seven degrees and non-Sabian images on twelve, and our page presented Hill's degrees and Blaschke's arcs as our own method. All of that is gone, and each degree page that was affected says what was wrong.

Copyright. Rudhyar's 1973 book was renewed and is protected in the United States to the end of 2068. Jones's 1953 book shows no renewal where one would have to be, which supports its being in the US public domain, but it is protected to 2050 in Canada and Australia; the 1925 card wording, first published in 1998, may be protected to at least 2047, with no clear owner. Hill's books and site are in copyright. So we quote none of them and write every line ourselves. "Sabian Symbols" is a descriptive name that no trade mark covers.

Terms

Sabian symbol
The image of one degree of the zodiac, one of 360 recorded in San Diego in 1925. We say "the Sabian symbol of Gemini 24", never "a Sabian" alone.
Degree (Gemini 24)
A degree is named by its sign and number, "Gemini 24" or "the 24th degree of Gemini". A position is written with minutes beside it, "Gemini 23°54′", and falls in the degree it is in, counted from one.
Absolute degree
The degree's number in the whole zodiac, Aries 1 = 1 to Pisces 30 = 360; the sign's index times 30, plus the degree in the sign.
Image
Our word for the symbol line, the picture itself. Ours are EsoTerrier's own wording after the 1925 pictures.
Keyword
Our two to four words naming the image's theme. Jones's 1953 "keyword" is his own term for his own word, which we do not use.
Keynote
Our one sentence on what the image may stand for. Rudhyar's "keynote" is his term for his own sentence, which we do not use.
Degree before and degree after
The degrees on either side of a placement, read beside it after Lynda Hill, who calls them its Karmic Condition and its Quest Degree.
Degree opposite
The degree 180° away, offered on our pages as a reading aid. It is arithmetic, not a teaching of Jones's.
Elsie Wheeler
The clairvoyant (1887 to 1938) who described the images in 1925. "Medium" and "psychic" are the sources' words for her.
The Sabian Assembly
Marc Edmund Jones's study group, formed in 1923 and named "Sabian" in 1928. Not the Sabians of Harran.
The Sabians of Harran
A star-centred pagan community of late antique and early Islamic Harran, in upper Mesopotamia, after whom Jones said he named his group.

Sample reading

Sample reading, AI-written for a fictional person.

Read the sample (1,308 words)

AI output can be wrong.

Jason, your Sun sits at Capricorn 29°55′, the 30th degree of Capricorn, and its image is a closed-door meeting of businessmen, keyed to "closed doors." Beside it stand your Moon at Cancer 7°47′, the 8th degree of Cancer, a parade of rabbits wearing clothes ("playing at dignity"), and your Ascendant at Leo 21°03′, the 22nd degree of Leo, a homing pigeon carrying a message ("faithful delivery").

One thing first. Your Sun is only five arc minutes short of the sign's end. By this rule, a small change in the recorded birth time or the ephemeris would carry it into the first degree of Aquarius and a different image. Hold the closed door firmly, but know it stands at a threshold.

Where you decide things

The tradition reads the Sun's degree as the centre of gravity, and yours is a room with the door shut. The image can be read as a mind that does its real work in private, among a very few, before anything is shown. A plan exists in you long before anyone else hears of it. By the time you speak, the vote has already been taken.

This is reinforced from another angle. Your Mercury at Aquarius 10°23′, the 11th degree of Aquarius, shows a man in private conversation with his own inspiration ("quiet revelation"). So even your thinking has a closed door. The idea that leads you on arrives when you are alone with it, and you tend to distrust ideas that arrive in a crowd.

Others experience this as composure, sometimes as opacity. People close to you may say they only learn your intentions when the decision is already made. You might lie awake turning a choice over, then sit across from one trusted person at the kitchen table to test it aloud once. The next morning you announce it as settled, and you are mildly surprised that anyone wants to reopen the discussion.

The last degree of Capricorn carries the weight of a sign completing itself. One way to see this: you are drawn to the moment when structure is finalised, when the terms are fixed and the minutes are signed. You want things concluded, and concluded properly.

How you carry yourself out the door

Then the door opens, and the Ascendant takes over. The homing pigeon is a creature of instinct and training together, flying a long distance to deliver something it did not write. The image can be read as a presence that seems purposeful and reliable on first meeting. People sense that you will arrive where you said you would.

This is a gentler face than the boardroom behind it. The pigeon does not argue with its message. It carries it. Others may treat you as a messenger, a go-between, the one trusted to relay what matters intact. And you may find real satisfaction in that role, because delivery is a form of fidelity.

The degree opposite can be read beside it, and here it is literally your Descendant at Aquarius 21°03′: children given a rug on the floor to play upon ("a place to play"). What you seek in partnership is the opposite of the closed meeting. You are drawn to people who lay down a soft place, or for whom you lay one down. Someone has to think ahead so that play is possible. In close bonds you can be that someone, and you may quietly hope to be on the receiving end for once.

The parade and the song indoors

Your Moon is the strangest image in the chart, and the most honest. A parade of rabbits wearing clothes: simple, soft, quick creatures dressed in the costume of a higher order. The tradition reads the Moon's degree as the feeling life, and this one can be read as an inner self that is tender and skittish underneath, wrapped in borrowed formality.

Here is the cost. The Sun wants the dignity of the closed meeting. The Moon suspects it is only playing at that dignity. You may feel, in the middle of a serious moment, a flash of the absurd: that everyone at the table, yourself included, is a rabbit in a waistcoat. Sometimes that gives you humour and humility. Sometimes it gives you the fear of being found out, of the costume slipping.

Your Saturn sits at Capricorn 7°47′, the 8th degree of Capricorn, the degree precisely opposite your Moon, to the same minute. Its image: indoors, birds singing gladly ("domestic joy"). Read side by side, the two make a pair. Outside, the parade, the effortful show of form. Inside, sheltered birds who sing because they are warm and safe. The tradition places discipline and limit in Saturn, and yours points toward the home and the protected interior as the place where you actually become dignified, without costume. The parade tires you. The warmed room restores you.

The North Node at Pisces 5°18′, the 6th degree of Pisces, deepens this: officers on parade in their dress uniforms ("disciplined display"). The South Node at Virgo 5°18′, the 6th degree of Virgo, is a carousel turning ("circular motion"). The tradition reads the axis as a direction of growth away from a familiar groove. The carousel is pleasant and repetitive, the same painted horses, round and round. The officers are also on parade, but their uniform is earned rather than borrowed. The rabbits of your Moon can become the officers of your North Node. The difference is whether the form you wear corresponds to real rank, built by real discipline.

The shadow in the shut room

The trap of a closed-door Sun is that privacy hardens into exclusion. Plans made among a few can leave out the very people they affect. You can become so practised at deciding alone that consultation feels like weakness, and the people around you learn that their input arrives too late to count.

Your Lilith (mean) at Virgo 27°54′, the 28th degree of Virgo, adds an edge: a man with no hair on his head ("bare determination"). Dominance taken openly, without ornament. When the polite surface of the Moon's costume and the Ascendant's dutiful pigeon both fall away, what is left is blunt will. You can shock people with how unadorned your insistence becomes once a decision is threatened.

There is a counterweight. Venus at Capricorn 11°35′, the 12th degree of Capricorn, shares its degree with your Vertex at Capricorn 11°06′: a naturalist gives a talk ("knowledge made visible"). Close study shared aloud. What you love, and what tends to find you, asks you to bring your private study into the open. Following Lynda Hill's practice of reading the degree beside, your Neptune at Capricorn 10°37′ sits one step behind, in the 11th degree, many pheasants together ("protected abundance"). Beauty gathered and sheltered precedes beauty spoken about. That is your pattern in miniature: gather privately, then present.

Your Midheaven at Taurus 12°19′, the 13th degree of Taurus, a man busy with bags and cases ("handling the load"), and Mars at Taurus 0°22′, the 1st degree of Taurus, clean water running down from the mountains ("pure source"), suggest that your visible path is practical, a matter of carrying what needs moving, and that your energy runs best when its origin is clean and uncomplicated. When your motives get muddy, the whole system slows.

One thing to do

Before your next real decision, the kind you would normally settle behind the closed door, open the door one meeting earlier than feels comfortable. Bring the plan to two people while it is still unfinished, and tell them plainly that it is unfinished. Let them see the rabbit before the uniform goes on. Then notice what changes in the plan, and what changes in you, when the naturalist gives the talk before the minutes are signed.

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Sources

Primary texts (12)
  1. Marc Edmund Jones, The Sabian Symbols in Astrology: Illustrated by One Thousand Horoscopes of Well-Known People. New York: Sabian Publishing Society, 1953. Facts only; none of its wording is quoted.
  2. Marc Edmund Jones, Symbolical Astrology, mimeographed lessons 849 to 874, 18 May to 9 November 1931 (private circulation). Known from catalogue listings; not seen.
  3. Dane Rudhyar, The Astrology of Personality. New York: Lucis Publishing, 1936. Not opened.
  4. Dane Rudhyar, An Astrological Mandala. New York: Random House, 1973. In copyright; facts only.
  5. Lynda Hill and Richard Hill, The Sabian Symbols as an Oracle. Avalon, NSW: White Horse Books, 1995; expanded edition 2002. Not opened.
  6. Lynda Hill, 360 Degrees of Wisdom. New York: Plume, 2004. Not opened; contents per degree from a review.
  7. Diana E. Roche, The Sabian Symbols: A Screen of Prophecy. Victoria, BC: Trafford, 1998 (the first reproduction of the 1925 cards). Not opened.
  8. Library of Congress, Copyright Office, Catalog of Copyright Entries, third series, vol. 7 part 1, July to December 1953: Jones's book, A104127. archive.org/details/catalogofcopyrig371li
  9. Catalog of Copyright Entries, renewal volumes 1958 to 1959 and 1963 to 1964, Project Gutenberg editions. gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/141
  10. US Copyright Office, Public Records System: searches for Jones, the Sabian symbols, Rudhyar and An Astrological Mandala (2026-10-10 and 2026-10-13). publicrecords.copyright.gov
  11. 17 U.S.C. 303(a), the term of works created but unpublished before 1978. law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/303
  12. USPTO and EUIPO TMview trade mark searches for SABIAN and the Sabian names (2026-10-10). tmsearch.uspto.gov
Studies and other sources (25)
  1. Diana E. Roche, "The Sabian Symbols: Origin and History", the Sabian Assembly. sabian.org/sabian_symbols.php
  2. The Sabian Assembly: the Sabian Symbol Oracle and the "Sabian Symbol at Sunrise" page. sabian.org/sabian_symbol_oracle.php
  3. The Sabian Assembly, "Marc Edmund Jones" (biography). sabianassembly.org/mej.html
  4. Lynda Hill, sabiansymbols.com: "The Sabian Symbols Story", "Karmic and Quest Degrees" (2023) and her notes on using the symbols. sabiansymbols.com/about/the-sabian-symbols-story
  5. Astrodienst, "Sabian Symbols", Astrowiki. astro.com/astrowiki/en/Sabian_Symbols
  6. Aeclectic Tarot, review of Lynda Hill's 360 Degrees of Wisdom (2005). aeclectic.net/tarot/books/360-degrees-of-wisdom
  7. Pittwater Online News, "Lynda Hill profile", issue 33 (November 2011). pittwateronlinenews.com/lynda-hill-profile.php
  8. Library of Congress and Open Library catalogue records for Lynda Hill's books. openlibrary.org/works/OL8201368W
  9. Blain Bovee, The Sabian Symbols and Astrological Analysis. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn, 2004. Not opened.
  10. Robert P. Blaschke, Sabian Aspect Orbs. Earthwalk School of Astrology, 2000. Not opened. revelore.press/product/sabian-aspect-orbs
  11. Larson Publications, the publisher's description of The Sabian Symbols in Astrology. larsonpublications.com/shop/product-detail.php?keyword=product&id=84
  12. James Burgess, "Dane Rudhyar" (an outline of the structure of An Astrological Mandala). jamesburgess.com/dane-rudhyar.html
  13. "Marc Edmund Jones", Wikipedia (orientation only). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Edmund_Jones
  14. "Sabians of Harran", Wikipedia (orientation only). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabians_of_Harran
  15. "Dane Rudhyar", Wikipedia (orientation only). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dane_Rudhyar
  16. Kevin van Bladel, The Arabic Hermes: From Pagan Sage to Prophet of Science. Oxford University Press, 2009. Cited through the Wikipedia article.
  17. Geoffrey Dean, Arthur Mather, David Nias and Rudolf Smit, Understanding Astrology: A Critical Review of a Thousand Empirical Studies 1900-2020. Amsterdam: AinO, 2022. astrology-and-science.com
  18. Astrograph Software, "Sabian Symbols" (TimePassages). astrograph.com/learning-astrology/planetary-condition/sabian-symbols
  19. Kerykeion, "Sabian symbols: introduction". kerykeion.net/content/learn-astrology/branches-sabian-introduction
  20. Augurine, Sabian Symbol Calculator (run with a test birth only). augurine.com/tools/sabian-symbol-calculator
  21. YesAstrology, Sabian Symbols Calculator. yesastrology.com/en/tools/chart-calculators/sabian-symbols-calculator
  22. Astrolium, Sabian Symbols tool. astrolium.com/tools/sabian-symbols
  23. Astro-Seek, Sabian symbols calendar. horoscopes.astro-seek.com/sabian-symbols-calculator-calendar
  24. astrodifferent, Sabian oracle and degree lookup. astrodifferent.com/calculators/sabian-oracle-calculator
  25. Find a Grave, memorial 110998136, Elsie May Wheeler (corroboration of her dates only).
Our own research (5)
  1. EsoTerrier, draconic chart and Sabian symbols research, 10 October 2026, with the wording checks of 13 and 14 October 2026.
  2. EsoTerrier calculation engine, the Sabian symbols service and its 360-line table in our own words.
  3. EsoTerrier calculation engine documentation, "Sabian Symbols".
  4. The retired page writer's source file for this system (July 2025): a list of claims to check, not a source.
  5. Our earlier public page on the Sabian symbols (10 October 2026), replaced by this one.
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By EsoTerrier. Written with AI assistance from our research and checked against its sources; last revised 20 October 2026. How we write these pages.

First published ; last revised . Corrections: support@esoterrier.com.

Sabian symbols after Elsie Wheeler and Marc Edmund Jones (San Diego, 1925). The wording of the images, the keywords and the keynotes are EsoTerrier's own. The degree before and after are read after Lynda Hill.