Elsie Wheeler

What is recorded of Elsie Wheeler comes almost entirely through Marc Edmund Jones's own account of her. She worked as a professional clairvoyant medium, seeing paying clients, at a time when she was already, by every description that survives, seriously disabled by arthritis and confined to a wheelchair. Jones described her as having a brilliant and imaginative mind housed in a body that gave her constant pain, and as growing weary of the ordinary run of client questions she was asked, about money and romance, when her gift seemed to her capable of more.

Jones came to know her in 1923 and admired her enough to sponsor his experiment specifically around her ability. When he proposed the undertaking that became the Sabian sitting, he described her as eager to take part precisely because she saw in it a chance to contribute something lasting to astrology rather than another afternoon of routine readings. Beyond this, and beyond the sitting itself, no independent biographical record of her has yet come to light in the sources consulted for this entry. What little else can be inferred comes from the shape of the 1925 material itself: the images she produced range across ordinary domestic scenes, natural imagery and the occasional violent or macabre picture, suggesting a mind that drew as readily on everyday experience as on anything more esoteric. Jones never published a fuller portrait of her beyond this, and no autobiographical writing of her own, if she left any, has been located in the sources reviewed here.

On an unrecorded day in 1925, Wheeler and Jones sat together in Balboa Park, San Diego, and carried out the experiment Jones had designed. He called out each of the 360 degrees of the zodiac in an order meant to keep her from anticipating any pattern to what was coming, and for each one she spoke, without pause or revision, a brief image as it arose for her. The entire set was produced verbally, in his presence, within the span of a single day.

Jones took the resulting images away to study for nearly thirty years before publishing his own interpretive keynotes for them in 1953. Wheeler's role was, by his own description, purely as the clairvoyant instrument of that single sitting; the organizing, naming and eventual publication of the material was his own later and separate work. She is remembered today almost entirely for that one day's work, a case where the primary source is a single collaborator's memoir rather than any record she left in her own words. Because Wheeler worked without any written prompt in front of her and without any chance to revise an image once she had spoken it, the resulting set carries an unevenness that later interpreters, including Jones himself and, decades afterward, Dane Rudhyar, treated as a feature rather than a flaw: each image reads as a single unrehearsed impression rather than a considered composition. The session has no independent witness beyond Jones's own account, which is itself the entire evidentiary basis for how the two of them are remembered together, one as the astrologer who organized and published, the other as the clairvoyant instrument the whole undertaking depended on.