The best-known set of degree symbols in Western astrology was produced in a single sitting in San Diego in 1925. The astrologer Marc Edmund Jones wrote each of the 360 degrees of the zodiac on a separate card, shuffled the pack face down, and worked through it with Elsie Wheeler, a medium who had severe rheumatoid arthritis and used a wheelchair. For each card drawn she reported an image; Jones recorded what she said. By his account the whole set was taken in one continuous session on a bench in Balboa Park, because he believed breaking it across days would break the unity of the result.
The name has nothing to do with the images. Jones had founded an esoteric study group called the Sabian Assembly two years earlier, borrowing the name from the Sabians, a scriptural community named in the Qur'an who were later identified with the star-venerating Harranians of late antiquity. He wanted the association with an old astral religion. No historical Sabian had any part in the 1925 material.
The symbols circulated privately in the Assembly's lesson papers for nearly thirty years before Jones published them, with his own commentary, as The Sabian Symbols in Astrology in 1953. That long gap matters for anyone trying to trace the wording, because what was in the lessons, what Wheeler actually said, and what reached print in 1953 are not guaranteed to be word for word the same thing, and Jones is the only witness to any stage of it.