A Sabian Symbol is an image attached to a single degree of the zodiac. The zodiac is a circle of 360 degrees, and each degree has its own picture: a scene of a few words, like "a woman just risen from the sea; a seal is embracing her," or "in the heat of the noon hour a man takes a siesta." Three hundred and sixty degrees, three hundred and sixty images.
They are not metaphors someone sat down and invented to mean something. They were received — described one after another in a single afternoon — and only afterward interpreted. That distinction is the whole point of the system, and it's worth understanding before you read your own.
Where they came from
The symbols date to October 1925, in Balboa Park, San Diego. The astrologer Marc Edmund Jones brought a clairvoyant named Elsie Wheeler to a park bench with 360 blank cards, each marked only with a zodiac degree. He shuffled them face-down; she described the image she saw rising for each one. By the end of the sitting, all 360 degrees had a picture. That full origin story is worth reading on its own — but the short version is that the images came through a person, fast, without deliberation.
How a symbol is named
Each symbol belongs to a degree, written like "14° Libra." That means the fourteenth degree of Libra — and because Libra is the seventh sign, it's also the 194th degree of the whole zodiac. Every sign holds 30 degrees, so there are 30 symbols per sign and 360 in total. You can browse them all in the complete index, or jump to a single sign such as Aries or Scorpio.
What a symbol is for
In a birth chart, your Sun sits at one exact degree, and so does your Moon, your Ascendant, and every planet. Each of those degrees carries a Sabian image. Reading the symbol means working with the picture directly: what the scene shows, what it suggests about how that part of you operates, where its gift sits, and where its shadow lives. It's a more concrete, image-first way into a chart than abstract degree meanings — which is exactly the difference between Sabian Symbols and traditional astrology.
The Jones keyword
Marc Edmund Jones later attached a single keyword to each degree — a one-word compression of its meaning, like Realization or Recuperation. The keyword is a handle, not the whole reading, but it tells you what register a degree operates in. We explain these in the guide to Jones keywords.
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Find your Sabian Symbol →The short version
- 360 images, one per degree of the zodiac.
- Received clairvoyantly in 1925, not invented.
- Each carries an image plus a one-word Jones keyword.
- Your Sun, Moon and Ascendant each sit at a degree — and so each has its own symbol.