In 1925, in San Diego, the astrologer Marc Edmund Jones sat with a clairvoyant named Elsie Wheeler and a deck of three hundred sixty cards, each marked with a degree of the zodiac and nothing else. Over a single day she spoke an image for each card as he drew it, without seeing which degree it was, and he wrote them down. The result is the Sabian symbols: a picture for every degree, from the first of Aries to the last of Pisces. Dane Rudhyar reworked and popularized them in the 1970s, and they have been part of the working astrologer’s kit ever since.
A degree is a specific place. The Moon at 4° Taurus and the Moon at 27° Taurus are in the same sign, but they are not the same Moon, and the symbols give each degree a face. Astrologers use them by rounding up: a body at 3°15′ Taurus is in the fourth degree, and the fourth degree has its image. Moondark does the same. Wherever it prints a specific degree, a station, an eclipse, a New Moon, the Moon’s position right now, it prints the image for that degree beside it, in Cormorant, the way it sets any line meant to be held in the mind rather than scanned.
The 1925 wording is a century old and shows it. Some images are plain and timeless: a wide-brimmed hat lifted by an east wind, a storm gathering in a canyon. Others are furnished with the fashions and assumptions of their year and no longer land. Moondark keeps the original phrases in its source of record, unaltered, and shows the reader a modernized image where the original has dated: the same picture, drawn again in plainer light, the way a restorer lifts a century of varnish without touching the paint. Where the original stands, it stands. Nothing is added to what Wheeler saw; the wording is renewed so that the image, and not its costume, is what reaches the reader.
Moondark never uses the symbols to predict anything. They are images, offered the way a line of a poem is offered, for the reader to hold against the moment and see what it does. Some will land and some will not. That is the nature of images, and it is why they have lasted.