A sign is a large thing. It covers thirty degrees of the zodiac, and everybody born in the same month shares one. A Sabian symbol is a small thing: one image for one degree, a thirtieth of a sign. There are 360 of them, one for every degree of the zodiac, and each is a short picture rather than a definition. The first degree of Aries is "A woman rises out of water, a seal rises and embraces her". The second is "A comedian entertaining a group". Nobody has ever claimed they were tidy.

That is part of their charm, and part of their usefulness. A sign tells you the general climate of a planet. The symbol on its degree tells you something closer to a scene.

Where the symbols came from

In 1925, in Balboa Park in San Diego, the American astrologer Marc Edmund Jones sat with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler. He had prepared 360 cards, one for each degree, and shuffled them, so the degrees came up in random order. He drew them one at a time, and for each card Wheeler, who did not see which degree it was, described the image that came to her. Jones wrote everything down. They finished in a single afternoon.

Jones then spent decades studying the images, gave each one a keyword and a commentary, and published the full set in 1953. The name comes from the Sabian Assembly, the study group Jones had founded. The symbols have been in use ever since, and they remain the most specific thing in astrology: no other technique says anything at the level of a single degree.

The images carry the marks of their time. A few of them, written in 1925, use words that would not be printed today. In our report those few are reworded in plain modern language, and Jones's originals are kept unchanged in our data.

How a degree gets its symbol

Every planet in your chart stands at a precise position, such as 14 degrees and 36 minutes of Leo. The symbol belongs to the whole degree that position falls in. And here is the detail that confuses almost everyone the first time.

The symbols are counted, not measured, the way the days of a month are counted. The first degree of a sign runs from 0°00' to 0°59', the second from 1°00' to 1°59', and so on. So a planet at 14°36' Leo is in the fifteenth degree of Leo, and takes the symbol of Leo 15, not Leo 14. A planet at 29°35' Gemini takes the thirtieth symbol of Gemini, the last one.

This is not a mistake on the page. It is the convention Jones set, and the one most sources follow. It also explains why people who look up their symbol in two different places sometimes get two different images: one of the sources forgot to count. For the same reason, our report writes a symbol's place as "Leo 15", with no degree sign, so that nobody reads it as a measurement.

One more practical point. A planet near the very end of a degree, say at 14°58', is almost on the next degree. It is worth reading the neighboring symbol as well. The boundary is a convention; the sky does not have tick marks.

What our report shows

The report gives a symbol to every point of your chart: the Sun, the Moon, each planet from Mercury to Pluto, and the North Node. If your birth time is known, it adds the Ascendant and the Midheaven. Without a birth time, the angles are simply left out rather than calculated for an invented hour, because a symbol for a guessed Ascendant would be a picture of nothing.

The personal points come first, each as a painted card: the Sun, the Moon, the Ascendant, the Midheaven, Mercury, Venus and Mars. Every one of the 360 degrees has its own painting, and each card shows the image, the symbol, its keyword and where it sits in your chart. You can download a card or share it.

The slower planets, from Jupiter outward, are shown as smaller pictures. This is a matter of honesty rather than space. Pluto takes about twelve years to cross a sign, so its degree is shared by everyone born within months of you. Its symbol says more about a generation than about you, and presenting it as your personal card would be overselling it.

Below the cards, a table lists every degree in your chart with its symbol and keyword, and each symbol comes with a commentary. The commentary is our own plain, modern rephrasing of Jones's, written so that a reader today does not need a dictionary from 1953. The symbols and keywords themselves are his.

If you want to go further, you can ask the AI astrologer to read your symbols together, as a set, against the rest of your chart.

Which symbols to read first

Start with three. The Sun's symbol speaks about what a life is organized around. The Moon's speaks about what it needs to feel at home. The Ascendant's speaks about how it meets the world, and because the Ascendant moves through a degree in about four minutes, it is the most personal of the three, and the one that most depends on an accurate birth time.

Take an example. Someone has the Sun at 15°20' Leo. That is the sixteenth degree, Leo 16, "Sunshine just after a storm", keyword RECOVERY. A sign-level reading would say "warm, proud, generous". The symbol adds a story: a warmth that shows most clearly after something difficult, the person who is at their best the morning after the crisis, making breakfast for everyone who stayed up worrying.

How to read a symbol

A Sabian symbol is an image, not an instruction. It is meant to be sat with rather than solved. Some will feel exact the moment you read them. Others will seem strange or even comic, and those are often the ones that make sense months later, usually at an inconvenient moment.

The worst thing to do with a puzzling symbol is to look up one interpretation and decide that is what it means. The better thing is to keep it somewhere you will see it, and notice when life starts quoting it back to you. People who do this tend to report the same experience: one day the image stops being odd and starts being obvious.

When you are ready, find the Sabian symbols in your chart here, and start with the cards for your Sun, Moon and Ascendant.

Frequently asked questions

What are the Sabian symbols?
A set of 360 images, one for each degree of the zodiac, described by the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler and written down by the astrologer Marc Edmund Jones in San Diego in 1925. Jones published them with keywords and commentaries in 1953.

Why is my symbol one degree higher than my planet?
Because the degrees are counted like days of a month, not measured. Anything from 14°00' to 14°59' of a sign is its fifteenth degree, so it takes the fifteenth symbol. That is the convention Jones set.

Which points get a symbol?
The Sun, the Moon, every planet from Mercury to Pluto, and the North Node. With a known birth time, the Ascendant and the Midheaven too. The seven personal points get a full painted card.

Do I need my birth time?
For the Sun and the planets, a date is usually enough. The Moon moves about half a degree an hour, so its symbol can change during the day. For the Ascendant and the Midheaven, you need an accurate time, since the Ascendant's symbol changes every few minutes.

Is the commentary Jones's own text?
No. The symbols and keywords are Jones's, from the Sabian Assembly's edition of his 1953 text. The commentary is our own modern rephrasing of his, in plain language.