The Reception at Balboa Park

On an unrecorded day in 1925, the astrologer Marc Edmund Jones drove the medium Elsie Wheeler to a quiet stretch of Balboa Park in San Diego. Wheeler suffered from severe arthritis and could not easily leave the car, so the two worked from where they sat, close enough to the city to feel its ordinary life around them but undisturbed by passers-by. Jones had prepared 360 small cards beforehand, one for every degree of the zodiac, each marked only with a sign and a number so that neither of them could know in advance which degree was under consideration. He shuffled the cards continuously and held each one face down before Wheeler in turn. In fleeting seconds she described whatever picture flashed into her mind, and Jones wrote her words down as she spoke them, without correction or discussion between sittings.

Between them they moved through the entire circle of 360 degrees inside a single sustained day, and Jones called the resulting set the Sabian symbols, borrowing the name from an antique Middle Eastern school of wisdom he associated the method with rather than from anything at the park itself. He held the results privately for years before publishing them in full in his 1953 book The Sabian Symbols in Astrology, by which point the working notes and the exact spot in the park had already gone unrecorded. The park's own history, an exposition ground of Spanish Colonial Revival buildings raised a decade earlier, plays no part in the symbols' content; it was simply where the two of them happened to be sitting undisturbed.