Charubel (John Thomas)

John Thomas was born in Wales on 9 November 1826. As a young man he studied toward a career in the ministry, but by his own later account he found himself unable to reconcile that path with the psychic and clairvoyant abilities he had begun to discover in himself, and he chose the latter. Writing afterward under the pen name Charubel, he built a career as an astrologer, herbalist and clairvoyant consultant, and for a time led an occult teaching order of his own devising, which he later dissolved. He also edited several periodicals over the course of his working life.

He died on 11 November 1908, two days after his eighty second birthday. His best known work continued to circulate after his death: a 1907 edition paired his original material with separate commentary by the younger astrologer Sepharial (Walter Gorn Old), keeping the book in print for a new generation of readers who had never encountered Thomas himself. His decision to set aside the ministry for clairvoyant work was, by the standards of Victorian Wales, a genuine break with respectability, and he wrote afterward of having weighed the two paths seriously before choosing the one that matched what he actually experienced rather than the one that was expected of him. As Charubel he built a modest but committed following through his periodicals and his private consultations, working alongside better known figures in the British astrological revival of the later nineteenth century without ever becoming as widely known as they were.

Charubel's central work first appeared as a series of articles in Alan Leo's Astrologer's Magazine, running from December 1890 over roughly three years, before being gathered into book form as The Degrees of the Zodiac Symbolized in 1898. For each of the 360 degrees of the zodiac he supplied a short symbolic image meant to be read alongside the ordinary astrological meaning of the degree, a format that anticipated, by more than a generation, the better known project Marc Edmund Jones and Elsie Wheeler carried out in 1925.

No direct textual link between Charubel's images and the later Sabian material has been established in the sources reviewed here; the two projects are independent efforts in the same genre rather than one drawing on the other. What can be said is that Charubel's book set a durable precedent within Western astrology for treating each of the 360 degrees as the occasion for its own distinct symbolic picture, a format the later and more widely known Sabian Symbols shares without, so far as is documented, having borrowed from it directly. Where the Sabian material eventually reached a global audience through Jones's and later Rudhyar's published keynotes, Charubel's degrees remained a comparatively specialist reference, kept in circulation mainly through reprints such as the 1907 edition rather than through any single canonical restatement.