A Journey into the Sabian Symbols
by Lynda Hill
"The Sabian Symbols are... a series of symbolic pictures that are meant to arouse in the student a realization of the power of his own creative spirit." Dane Rudhyar (1)
Studying astrology has enriched my life more than I could have imagined. I now regularly travel the world lecturing and consulting and my articles are published in magazines and journals worldwide. Up until a few years ago, I would never have thought this possible, never having lectured or written, but now I can look back on my life's journey and see the unfolding of this inevitable path.
I can now see that for twenty years I have been involved in a quest that has taken me all over the world and touched me with the wisdom of civilisations past and I feel I have been guided and driven even from the early years of my life.
Apart from being a mother and wife, the study and spreading the message of the Sabian Symbols is also an integral part of my life. I didn't understand, in the beginning, that I was drawn to certain places in order to begin this quest.
At the age of 22, I felt compelled to travel to the Middle East, to walk on their soil and breathe their air. I felt particularly drawn to Iraq and Jordan and for a 22 year old, in 1976, this was not the usual case! On the exact day that I boarded the plane for these countries Pluto was exactly conjunct my 10th house Mars. Pluto transits force us to confront our dark side. They can plunge us into emotional turmoil and bring us face to face with extreme difficulties. Maybe I wouldn't have gone if I'd known, or at the very least, I would have been a lot more reticent to reach out for some of the experiences that were offered.
There is, however, always buried treasure inherent in Pluto transits, and the rewards I found certainly outweighed the difficulties. Pluto transiting over Mars can be a particularly brutal and enormously powerful energy to deal with. One can feel exposed, naked and stripped bare of one's power base. Often, the trick of these transits is to find our hidden reserves of personal authority.
At that age I was very interested in astrology, but really didn't do any in depth analysis. I certainly had no conscious knowledge of the Sabian Symbols. My father was an astrologer and an Edgar Cayce healer, having been instrumental in setting up the Association of Research and Enlightenment in Australia. Pluto was discovered in 1930 and the effects of Pluto in a person's chart were just beginning to be really understood. My father's astrology days were rather pre-Pluto-awareness and so I sailed off to the Middle East with little understanding of the depth-charge that was about to explode. I had some hair-raising adventures, to say the least.
On this first major trip, in 1976, I arrived in Teheran, by myself, to meet up with a bus tour that would take me throughout the middle east. It was an `overland expedition' that was popular amongst the alternative youth travellers of the day. The alarm bells should have rung when Pan Am lost my luggage (it went to Frankfurt, but nobody told me that for four days), and I had not thought to pre-book any accommodation. There was a religious festival being held and the only bed available was at a hotel called the `Amir Kabir' where I had to share a room with two girls, one from Australia, the other from Denmark. I was wearing only jeans, platform shoes and a see-through blouse (boy, was I naive!). It was winter in Iran and bitterly cold and I was staying in a hotel nicknamed `the arsehole of the earth', but Pluto is a deep world and I hadn't yet plumbed its depths.
My room-mates believed they were impressing me with stories about having sex with bus drivers as they hitch-hiked across Afghanistan; my luggage didn't arrive for 5 days (no change of clothes), I could only afford a very smelly sheepskin coat that got smellier as I wore it; I got dysentery; the toilets were on the mezzanine level overlooking the `restaurant' and had no doors; the sink in our room had no plumbing; and my bed was riddled with bedbugs. This is definitely a good example of a Pluto/Mars transit.
Finally the bus arrived and me and 36 others careened off through the lands of Iran and Iraq. I really enjoyed the people and the countryside of Babylon, Baghdad, Ur, Ctesiphon, Petra, Aqaba, etc, relishing the atmosphere - it is all so Plutonian - and really wondering, at times, what I was doing there. Some years later I'm getting a glimpse.
The whole Sabian Symbol story is embedded in the ancient cultures of the Middle East. Marc Edmund Jones, the spiritualist and astrologer who gave birth to the Sabian Symbols with Elsie Wheeler, felt that there was an unseen agency at work in the birthing of the Symbols. He wrote in The Sabian Symbols in Astrology `The whole Sabian enterprise... has been primarily a species of tapping back into early Mesopotamian and allied roots or of utilizing a matrix of reasoned conclusions from which so much of language and its notation or of mathematical abstraction and scientific achievement, seems to have streamed.'(2) Jones was referring to the ancient Mesopotamian brotherhood, the Sabians. He believed that they were the `ancient mind-matrix' that was behind the experiment.
The Sabian people were an ancient race of alchemists, living in Harran, a city on the banks of the Euphrates river in Mesopotamia (now known as Iraq). Harran existed from the third millennium BC to the thirteenth century AD. It was a centre of trade for metals and also the repository for the philosophy of the ancient Chaldeans, who were among the founders of astrology. The Sabian people maintained and developed the tradition of Chaldean astrology, when it had been obliterated elsewhere. Their rather sophisticated system of alchemy linked the 7 planets (as were known then) with metals, colours and numbers. The last temple to their old religion left standing was a moon temple, destroyed by the Tartars in AD 1032. The sect itself disappeared during Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, when its water supply was diverted to a neighbouring town, thus terminating its long and illustrious history.(3)
The Sabian Symbols were given birth in San Diego, California, in 1925 by Marc Edmund Jones, a noted American astrologer and spiritualist and the gifted clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler. Jones was interested to find a set of degree symbols (a symbol for every degree of the zodiac), that was less judgmental and more of a reflection of contemporary American life than the degree symbols that were currently available. Elsie Wheeler was an extraordinary clairvoyant, crippled by arthritis for most of her life, with a remarkable ability to "see" symbols (or images). Dane Rudhyar acknowledged this as being true of many clairvoyants of this type, but "she... proved to have ability to a spectacular degree."
The degrees were "manifested" one day in 1925 in San Diego's Balboa Park. Unfortunately, the date was apparently not recorded. Marc Edmund Jones took Miss Wheeler to Balboa Park in his car, where they worked all day. They deliberately found a place in the park very close to a busy intersection where they would be surrounded by the vibrations of modern American life. Jones used a set of 360 cardboard cards, these were blank except for a small notation of the sign and degree. He would shuffle the cards and place a card in front of her, neither of them knowing the degree or sign on the card and she would describe a scene and Jones would write it on the back of the card, hence it was done completely at random. The complete set of 360 degree symbols were written down in one day, a truly extraordinary feat.
In the 1930's, Jones' students of the Sabian Assembly started using the Symbols and found amazing results from placing them in natal charts. Dane Rudhyar heard about their extraordinary ability to describe a person's destiny and applied for and received permission from Jones to use the Symbols in his book The Astrology of Personality (first published in 1936). In this book Rudhyar did a concise, 3 line interpretation. In 1953, Jones wrote his book The Sabian Symbols in Astrology, describing them in terms of sign polarity and giving them both a positive and negative interpretation and illustrated the applications of the Symbols by relating them to horoscopes of 1,000 well-known people.
Twenty years later, in 1973, after a lot of research and investigation into the complete structure of the 360 degree series, Rudhyar wrote An Astrological Mandala. This book gave them an incredible new layer of meaning. Rudhyar employing a more holistic and humanistic approach, promoted the idea of using the Sabian Symbols as an oracle. He described them as a "... contemporary American I Ching."
I came across the Sabian Symbols in the late 1980's and found them fascinating and very telling about a person's life and indeed their destiny. For a few years I put them into charts and used them in readings and found them very useful and reliable in painting the person's story. I didn't connect with the Sabian history and my chequered past until later.
In 1992, a clairvoyant friend of mine told me that I had a mission to spread the word of the Sabian Symbols. She held my hand and told me that I would be invited to lecture at conferences in Australia and around the world, but particularly in the United States. This was on my birthday, I'd had a few drinks and my instant response was `sure, Georgina, when I stand up in front of a crowd to speak, I turn to jelly. I even cried once!'. I didn't feel filled with confidence about my ability to get my point across to more than a few people at a time.
But something that Georgina said to me that day resonated with what I really wanted to do, so I sat down and decided that I should `ask' for guidance and help in the ability to do what she said. I'd never done this before, so it was a bit unusual to even think about doing any sort of connecting with my inner self in that fashion. I did have Pluto square Pluto (from the 11th to the 8th) at that point, and two weeks after doing that meditation I was tearing around the house like a woman possessed, researching charts and writing about the Symbols. During this time I began to discover the complexity of my path of discovery.
I gave two lectures in Sydney later that month and 5 months later delivered my first lecture to an American audience at the Aquarian Revelation Conference in Lansing, Michigan. In the short time since then, I have spoken at several Conferences and given lots of lectures and workshops at venues in the United States and Australia. Every step of the way I've felt guided and supported by people who seem to be always turning up at the right moment.
At lunch after giving my first lecture in the United States (and only my third lecture ever!), Michael Lutin - a fabulous astrologer from New York - asked me to describe the 1st degree of Scorpio to him. There are 360 Sabian Symbols and as luck (or destiny) would have it, although I didn't have this Symbol in my chart or the charts of my family, I happened to know it well. Scorpio 1: `Tourists on a Sight-Seeing Bus'. I said that the tourists knew where they were going, but they didn't know what it looked like. They had maps and a guide, but it was a brand new experience for them - they didn't really know what it was like where they were going. There was the feeling of being cocooned, but there was also the feeling of being an observer and being observed, sort of like a gold-fish bowl, which can lead to a sense of alienation. Pictures and souvenirs of the journey would be sought out. We were walking down some stairs by this point and Michael almost fell down them! I'd just described the exact scenario he had in his head; he'd put on a fabulous stage show at an enormous astrology conference in Washington D.C., about aliens coming from outer space on a friendly visit to earth. Each day before the show, some 1600 people at the conference would get a map of where the aliens were on their journey and where to find them when they landed (the time, date and venue of the show). His immediate reaction was to invite me to speak at a conference in New York, to be held the next year. Suddenly, I knew that I would be off to the States again, within 12 months.
I sometimes think back on my travels and what their purpose really was. In that journey through the Middle East there was an extraordinary occurrence. I went to Petra in Jordan in March 1976 and sat in the amphitheatre. I was moved to say `thanks'. I was surely at home. I had never felt at home anywhere. I went to eleven different schools, my parents moved around everywhere and I have now been to more than 70 countries). But, sitting in Petra, I felt as if I had lived there before. This was definitely strange for a 22 year old who loved the discos and having fun on a superficial level (as with most of my peer group).
Robert Zoller, who lives in New York, (a Latin scholar who translates ancient Latin astrological texts into English) recently sent me some material on the background of the Sabian people (by the way, I've been having more Pluto transits; Pluto conjuncting my Sun, opposing my Moon - I have an exact Sun-Moon opposition). He points out in this material that the Sabian's forebears were the Nabateans. The Nabateans are from Petra, the place where I felt completely at home! The feelings in me that this information aroused defy words or logic.
Now for the technicalities. As the zodiac starts at 0 degrees and the Sabian Symbols are numbered from 1, you must always round up the zodiacal degree to the next whole degree. E.g. 27.15 Scorpio becomes 28 Scorpio in the Sabian Symbols. This applies to every degree and every part of the degree. 00Aries00 = 1 Aries therefore 25Taurus00 right to 25Taurus59 = 26 Taurus.
The following are some examples to help illustrate how these symbols are used. From the book The Sabian Symbols as an Oracle, written by my husband and myself (4):
Taurus 5: A Widow at an Open Grave, which speaks about "Don't let loss beckon you to give up and throw everything away. There must always be a time to grieve, but what is lost is lost and cannot be regained by losing yourself. Time to fill in the grave and let go. Gradual realization of the illusion of matter. Letting go of relationships and things that no longer work. Purging the past. If negative - wasting time staring at lost opportunities."
This is the degree of: The Mercury in the Oklahoma Bombing, the Moon in the World Trade Centre Explosion, Enrico Fermi's Ascendant, Josef Mengele's Saturn, Herman Goering's Node, Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Sun,
Taurus 17: A Battle Between Swords & Torche, which says "... there is a struggle between practical needs and the underlying reasons for having those needs. One may find that you have become caught up in what you are trying to achieve and have lost sight of why. The endeavour to bring `enlightenment' to people often meets with severe resistance. Witness the stranglehold the media has on information. Arguments over ideals. `Might' versus `light'. If negative - controlling with rational force rather than inner enlightenment."
This is Adolph Hitler's Venus and Mars conjunction degree, Sigmund Freud's Sun, Pat Buchanan's Uranus, Pat Nixon's Saturn, Oliver Cromwell's Mercury, and the Sun of the BBC announcement of victory at the end of World War II.
Taurus 24: An Indian Warrior Riding Fiercely, Human Scalps Hanging at his Belt. "You can be recognised for your abilities as a successful leader who is prepared to put themselves at risk to be successful. The risks you have taken are marked by rewards that are admired and respected. Claiming one's soil and one's due. Fighting for one's territory. Trophies of conquest. Aggression. Basic Instincts. Territoriality. If negative - displaying success so as to intimidate others. Domination and ruthlessness. Taking things because one can. Violation of other's space. Testosterone."
This is the Sun in Israel's chart, the Sun in Palestine's chart for the end of the British Mandate, the Chiron of the Third Reich and, I believe, the Moon of Yasser Arafat. The South Node in the new chart of South Africa - (the North Node in that chart is Scorpio 24: Crowds Coming Down the Mountain to Listen to One Inspired Man - which has to be Nelson Mandela). The Indian Warrior degree is also Clint Eastwood's Mercury - he is so often portrayed as the gun slinger.
Some illustrations from a single chart, that of T.E. Lawrence, otherwise known as Lawrence of Arabia - August 16, 1888 5 AM UT (0hrs), Tremadoc, Wales.
His Sun - Leo 24: Totally Concentrated Upon Inner Spiritual Attainment, a Man is Sitting in Complete Neglect of his Body. "There is a feeling of imbalance... it is as if many aspects of your life can be put on hold in favour of the central issue." Lawrence's major, overwhelming desire was the liberation of the Arabs. He risked his health, his life and his career to achieve that end.
Asc - Leo 23: - A Bareback Rider in a Circus Displays Her Dangerous Skill..."you may put yourself at risk to present your feelings boldly and skillfully. Controlling one's animal instincts. Defying gravity." (This is also the degree of Christopher Reeve's Pluto - he is now a quadriplegic after falling off a horse.)
Moon - Sagittarius 14: The Pyramids and the Sphinx... "a need to establish some type of monument. Spiritual ancestry ... negatively - great treasures robbed by the greedy." Lawrence had an enormous emotional connection to the Middle East and the Arabs - he fought hard to ensure that the Arabs kept what was rightfully theirs, and, by doing so, ensured himself a place in the history of the Middle East.
Venus - Virgo 4: Black and White Children Playing Together. "Universal brotherhood. Overcoming prejudices and boundaries." This played out with Lawrence wanting to join the Arabs.
Jupiter - Scorpio 28: The King of the Fairies Approaching His Domain. "You may feel that you are the dominant leader and that you have a doting populace. This can also picture a situation of `returning home', a nice, calm and spiritual place to be. Imaginary worlds." He was involved in the creation of a new kingdom of Arab unity, almost an ethereal, abstract ideal and he claimed a spiritual "sovereignty" over the Arabs.
Saturn - Leo 12: An Evening Lawn Party of Adults. Being Lawrence's Saturn, this was part of his world that he rejected completely. He hated the sense of superficiality where things are known but not said out loud and one's appearance and social standing take on too much importance - and the political correctness of such a world.
There is much more that could be said, this is just a quick tour-guide of these fabulous Symbols and the deeper humanistic level they can reveal. The Sabian Symbols provide another dimension of understanding to the messages inherent in a chart. In addition to traditional interpretations, an astrologer uses the Sabian Symbols to enhance their intuitive insights. These images can be used in every facet of astrological enquiry - natal, mundane, horary, lunations and, also, as an Oracle.
Bibliography:
1. An Astrological Mandala: The Cycle of Transformations and its 360 Symbolic Phases. (Vintage Books 1973) by Dane Rudhyar.
2. The Sabian Symbols in Astrology. (Sabian Publishing Society 1976) by Marc Edmund Jones.
3. History and Astrology - Clio and Urania Confer. Ed. Annabella Kitson (Allen & Unwin 1989) Ch IV - The Star Temples of Harran by Nick Kollerstrom
4. The Sabian Symbols as an Oracle. (White Horse Books 1995) by Lynda and Richard Hill.
Lynda Hill lives in Avalon, NSW, Australia. You may email her at lyndah@bigpond.com.
To order a copy of the book The Sabian Symbols as an Oracle, by Lynda & Richard Hill: In the United States - please send US$25.00 plus $5 for postage, to Alica Kashuba, 10240 Dolphin Road, Miami, Florida 33157. In Australia - send A$25.00, plus $5.00 for postage to Lynda Hill, P.O. Box 172, Avalon NSW 2107, Australia.
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