Charubel's 1898 image opens Sagittarius with a serpent whose body has taken the exact shape of the letter S, an animal that has become, in effect, a piece of writing. The image folds two things into one: a living creature and an abstract symbol, with no indication of which came first or whether the shape is coincidence or design.
That doubled nature suits the opening of a sign concerned with meaning and its transmission. A serpent is already one of the oldest images available for knowledge held close, sometimes guarded, sometimes offered; here it has additionally become legible, a shape that can be read rather than merely observed. Sagittarius spends its thirty degrees moving between raw experience and the frameworks used to interpret it, and this opening image already contains both halves in a single curved body.
The phrasing now in general circulation for this degree, and for the Sabian series generally, follows Dane Rudhyar's 1973 reworking of material Marc Edmund Jones and Elsie Wheeler produced together in 1925; that later, still-copyrighted text is not reproduced here. Within Mercury's decan (1 to 10 degrees) and Jupiter's opening term (1 to 12 degrees), quick intellect and expansive reach combine at the very start of a mutable fire sign, a serpent already curling itself into the shape of an idea before the sign has taken a single further step.