A Sabian symbol is a short symbolic image assigned to one degree of the zodiac. There are 360 of them, one for each degree from the first of Aries to the last of Pisces. Clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler received the images in 1925 and astrologer Marc Edmund Jones recorded them, and Dane Rudhyar revised the wording in 1973.

A planet's sign gives its broad character and its house gives the area of life it works in. Its Sabian symbol adds one vivid picture for the exact degree it occupies. Two people with the Sun in Taurus can carry very different degree images, and that image is what this calculator returns for every placement in your birth chart.

You need a degree, not a date. Read the exact zodiacal degree of the placement, then round up to the next whole number. A planet at 14°38′ Taurus sits in the 15th degree of Taurus, so it takes the 15th Taurus symbol. Any movement past a whole degree, even by a single minute, belongs to the next symbol.

The calculator above does this for your whole chart from positions built on the JPL DE440s ephemeris via ANISE, so nothing is rounded by hand. Enter your birth date, time, and place, and it returns the image and degree for your Sun, Moon, Ascendant, Midheaven, and every planet and point.

Most readers begin with three. Your Sun's symbol describes the core of your character, your Moon's symbol speaks to your instinctive and emotional life, and your Ascendant's symbol colors how you meet the world.

After that trio, the Midheaven points to vocation and public direction, and the personal planets fill in the texture of mind and desire. Slower placements (Jupiter through Pluto) carry an image too, though those belong as much to a generation as to one person.

A Sabian symbol is meant to be contemplated rather than decoded like a dictionary entry. Read the picture, then notice your first response to it: what stands out, what mood it carries, what it seems to be doing. Let the planet frame the image. The same symbol on your Venus speaks about how you love; on your Mars it speaks about how you act.

The keynote shown beside each image is a starting point, a short phrase that names the theme. Hold it loosely. The image carries more than any single line can, and your own association with it is part of the reading.

Sabian symbols are one of several ways to read a single degree, and they pair well with the others. Degree theory assigns a zodiac sign's energy to each degree on a repeating 12-degree cycle, a systematic layer rather than a set of images. Decans divide each sign into three 10-degree faces with a planetary ruler, and monomoiria go finer still, giving every single degree a planetary ruler. The anaretic degree flags a placement sitting at the very end of its sign.

Use them together. The Sabian symbol gives you the picture. The decan and monomoiria give you the rulership. Degree theory gives you the sign flavor of the degree. For the wider context, read the whole chart first and layer the degree tools on top of it.

The images trace to an afternoon in San Diego in 1925, when Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler worked through a shuffled set of 360 cards, one per degree, and Wheeler described an image for each. Dane Rudhyar reworked the phrasings in his 1973 book An Astrological Mandalaand set them in a developmental sequence. The wordings on this page follow Rudhyar's revision.

The degrees themselves come from the JPL DE440s ephemeris via ANISE, the same engine behind every Augurine chart, so the symbol you read here matches the degree you would read from an accurate chart. When a birth time is approximate, the faster points can fall on an adjacent degree, and the result view flags those.