Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Rudhyar's Rewrite, and the Sets That Came First

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Rudhyar's Rewrite, and the Sets That Came First

Most astrologers who quote a Sabian symbol today are not quoting Jones. They are quoting Dane Rudhyar, who had used the set since the 1930s and republished it in 1973 as An Astrological Mandala. Rudhyar restated many of the images in his own words, added a one-line keynote to each of the 360, and arranged them into a structure of five-degree groups rising into larger acts, so that the set reads as one continuous cycle rather than as 360 separate omens.

His stated reason for the rewrite was that Jones's commentary was written in the practical, individualist idiom of 1920s America and had aged into it. Whether that was an improvement is a matter of taste; what is not in dispute is that the rewriting was substantial creative work of Rudhyar's own, and it is his phrasing, not Wheeler's or Jones's, that circulates on websites and in software.

That has a consequence for this atlas, and it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving a reader to wonder why these pages are thin. An Astrological Mandala carries a 1973 copyright with notice and is protected in the United States until 2069. The degree text this site held was checked line by line against the book and matched it verbatim on all 360 symbols and all 360 keynotes, so it is withheld. Reproducing a complete 360-unit set is not occasional quotation; it is the work.

It is also worth knowing that the 1925 set was not the first attempt, and that astrologers who want degree symbolism have older options. The Welsh astrologer writing as Charubel published a complete set of 360 degree images in 1898, and a second series translated by Sepharial from an Italian manuscript attributed to Antonio Borelli, usually printed as La Volasfera, circulated in the same period. Both predate the Sabian set by a generation. Their existence is a useful check on any claim that the 1925 session produced something unrepeatable: producing a complete 360-image set turns out to be a thing that more than one person has done.

That is the series this atlas uses. Each degree page here carries Charubel's 1898 image rather than the Sabian one, named as his and dated, because it says something for the degree and carries no rights problem. Three degrees have none: two because his book prints no picture for them, and one because it prints a row of stars instead of words.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.