Marc Edmund Jones

Marc Edmund Jones had, by the early 1920s, established himself as a serious writer on astrology within the Theosophical circles of Southern California. He conceived an experiment: to obtain, through a clairvoyant working blind and unprompted, a symbolic image for every one of the 360 degrees of the zodiac, in a single unbroken session. In 1923 he met Elsie Wheeler, a clairvoyant medium confined to a wheelchair by severe arthritis, whose gift he had come to admire, and he asked her to be his partner in the undertaking.

On an unrecorded day in 1925, the two of them carried out the experiment on a park bench in Balboa Park, San Diego. Jones read out each degree of the zodiac in turn, in an order chosen to prevent Wheeler from anticipating a pattern, and Wheeler spoke a brief visualized image for each one as it came to her, with no time to deliberate and no chance to revise. The whole set of 360 images was produced verbally, in Jones's presence, over the course of that single day, becoming the raw material of what is now called the Sabian Symbols. Jones did not read the degrees to her in zodiacal order; he called them out in a scrambled sequence specifically so Wheeler could not track her position in the circle and unconsciously shape her images to an expected progression from one sign to the next. The images she returned, delivered without pause or revision, ranged from the domestic to the strange, an ordinary schoolroom beside a witch riding a broomstick, and Jones kept the full transcript rather than editing it down before beginning the long work of interpreting it.

Jones did not publish the 1925 material immediately. He spent nearly three decades studying and organizing it before releasing The Sabian Symbols in Astrology in 1953, the book that gave the images their now familiar keynotes and brought them into general astrological use. He was a prolific writer well beyond that single project, producing works on astrological method, esoteric philosophy and what he called a whole system of "sabian" thought, and in 1923 he founded the Sabian Assembly, an esoteric teaching order that continued to operate under his leadership for the rest of his life.

Jones also played a formative role in the career of Dane Rudhyar, whom he brought into serious astrological study through their common connection to the Theosophical Society; Rudhyar went on decades later to write his own independent interpretive set for the same 360 degrees. Jones died in 1980, and the Sabian Assembly he founded continued afterward under other leadership, still using the 1925 material as its founding document. The Assembly organized itself around a graded course of private study rather than public teaching, and it continued to operate under successive leaders after Jones's death in 1980, still treating the 1925 sitting as its founding event. Jones also wrote on subjects well outside astrology proper, including studies of Masonic symbolism and of what he termed sabian philosophy, a broader framework of cyclical and esoteric thought of which the astrological work was only one expression.