An Astrological Mandala, published by Random House in 1973, is Dane Rudhyar's book of interpretations for what astrologers call the Sabian symbols, one image assigned to each of the 360 degrees of the zodiac. The images themselves were not his. They were produced in a single sitting in 1925 by Elsie Wheeler, a clairvoyant working with the astrologer Marc Edmund Jones, who called out each degree in turn and recorded the picture Wheeler reported seeing. Jones published that material first, in 1953, as The Sabian Symbols in Astrology, in a comparatively terse, procedural style suited to a working astrologer's reference book.
Rudhyar came to the same 360 images two decades later from a different direction entirely. By the early 1970s he had spent a long career reworking Western astrology around a humanistic and, in his later writing, transpersonal psychology, arguing that a birth chart describes a process of individuation rather than a fixed fate. An Astrological Mandala applies that whole framework to Wheeler's images degree by degree, giving each one an extended interpretive essay rather than the short keynote-and-symbol format Jones had used. The book's prose is Rudhyar's own throughout; it does not reproduce Jones's wording, and this record in turn does not reproduce Rudhyar's, since the specific keynotes and interpretive text of An Astrological Mandala remain in copyright until 2069 and are withheld under this atlas's rights gate.
Because Rudhyar's version reached a much wider astrological readership than Jones's original, it is now the edition most commonly meant when a modern astrologer refers to "the Sabian symbols" in passing, even though the two books describe the same 360 images from two different generations and two different theoretical commitments.