An Astrological Mandala

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.

Rudhyar had already published extensively before 1973, including The Astrology of Personality in 1936 and later The Astrological Houses, and An Astrological Mandala arrived as the capstone application of that lifelong project to a body of material, Wheeler's images, that he had not created. Its influence within astrology since publication has been considerable: successive writers on the Sabian symbols largely work from Rudhyar's interpretive frame, or explicitly against it, more often than from Jones's original 1953 text, and popular references to a degree's symbolic meaning usually trace back to Rudhyar's essay for that degree rather than to Wheeler's bare image or Jones's shorter keynote.

That popularity is precisely why this atlas treats the book with particular care. All 360 Sabian symbol degrees already recorded here draw, directly or at one remove, on the imagery and interpretation this book and its 1953 predecessor established, and the atlas withholds the keynote, the image wording and the interpretive text for every one of those degrees: Rudhyar's specific phrasing is still in copyright and is not reproduced anywhere on this site. This record exists to state the facts a reader needs to understand that material's origin, who wrote it, when, in what tradition, and how it relates to Jones's earlier version, without at any point quoting, closely paraphrasing, or otherwise reproducing the wording those gated fields protect. Provenance is not the same as expression, and this article is provenance only.