The Sabian Assembly and a Working Life in Astrology

Jones did not publish the 1925 material immediately. He spent nearly three decades studying and organizing it before releasing The Sabian Symbols in Astrology in 1953, the book that gave the images their now familiar keynotes and brought them into general astrological use. He was a prolific writer well beyond that single project, producing works on astrological method, esoteric philosophy and what he called a whole system of "sabian" thought, and in 1923 he founded the Sabian Assembly, an esoteric teaching order that continued to operate under his leadership for the rest of his life.

Jones also played a formative role in the career of Dane Rudhyar, whom he brought into serious astrological study through their common connection to the Theosophical Society; Rudhyar went on decades later to write his own independent interpretive set for the same 360 degrees. Jones died in 1980, and the Sabian Assembly he founded continued afterward under other leadership, still using the 1925 material as its founding document. The Assembly organized itself around a graded course of private study rather than public teaching, and it continued to operate under successive leaders after Jones's death in 1980, still treating the 1925 sitting as its founding event. Jones also wrote on subjects well outside astrology proper, including studies of Masonic symbolism and of what he termed sabian philosophy, a broader framework of cyclical and esoteric thought of which the astrological work was only one expression.