The Chandra Symbols

Who created the Chandra Symbols?

John Sandbach created the Chandra Symbols. He has practised astrology full time since 1966 and has thirty-nine published works, among them Soul Journey Through the Tarot (Destiny Books, an imprint of Inner Traditions, 2023). He received the first set of the symbols in 1984 and named them, then published a book of short interpretations of them through Seek-It Publications. Other astrologers have since written about the symbols; the symbols themselves are his.

For years I thought of channeling a set of degree symbols, and then in 1984 I received my first set of them and called them the Chandra Symbols.

Three further sets followed in the years after: the Omega, the Pleiadian and the Azoth Symbols. All four are gathered in The Circular Temple, which sets 1,440 symbols in four groups of 360 against the degrees of the zodiac. The Chandra Symbols were the first of the four, and are the set his name is most often attached to.

What is a Chandra Symbol?

A Chandra Symbol is a short image given to one degree of the zodiac and expressed in words rather than in a picture. There are 360 of them, one to a degree. An astrologer looks up the degree a planet occupies and reads its symbol beside the meaning of that planet. The image is meant to be held in the imagination, not decoded.

Sandbach asks that the symbols be approached subjectively (imagined, felt, allowed to speak) rather than looked up as fixed definitions. Every one of the 360 is on this site, a page to a degree.

Read all 360 Chandra Symbols →

How are the Chandra Symbols used?

Three ways, in Sandbach’s own account. An astrologer looks up the degree of each planet in a chart and blends the symbol with the planet’s meaning. Anyone can use the symbols as an oracle, asking a question and taking a degree at random. And they can be read in order, or singly, as meditations.

Within his own four-set scheme Sandbach places the Chandra Symbols at the Descendant, the seventh house, where they describe how the energy of a degree meets and relates to the world around it. That is a matter of emphasis rather than restriction: any set can be used to read any degree in any chart.

I think of the use of degree symbols in reading a chart as astrological poetry.

How are the Chandra Symbols different from the Sabian Symbols?

They are separate sets by different authors. The Sabian Symbols were received by Elsie Wheeler and interpreted by the astrologer Marc Edmund Jones, and were the first set of degree symbols to become widely known in the West. The Chandra Symbols are John Sandbach’s, received in 1984, and are not a reworking of the Sabian images.

Degree symbols are older than either set: Western astrologers have used them since the late nineteenth century, when Charubel and Sepharial published interpretations of images they had received. The Sabian Symbols, written about extensively by Dane Rudhyar among others, were the first to reach a wide readership.

Ellias Lonsdale puts the two sets at different angles of the chart: the Sabian Symbols at the Ascendant, where the energy of a degree shows itself outwardly, and the Chandra Symbols at the Descendant, where it meets what is outside it.

One of Sandbach’s later sets does descend from the Sabian Symbols, and he says so plainly. Working from them years afterwards, he read each Sabian symbol and let another come to him in answer; those became the Pleiadian Symbols. The Chandra Symbols came without any such prompt.

Who else has written about the Chandra Symbols?

The astrologer Ellias Lonsdale has, at length. Sandbach’s own first book on the symbols gave them very short interpretations; Lonsdale’s Inside Degrees gives the same 360 symbols considerably fuller readings, and it is the book through which many readers first meet them.

The two have worked alongside each other for decades. Lonsdale read the later sets as Sandbach received them, and Sandbach credits him in The Circular Temple with guidance throughout its writing, calling him “the greatest living astrologer I know of.”

Where can I read all 360?

All 360 Chandra Symbols are free to read here, a page to each degree, each with John Sandbach’s interpretation of it. All four of his symbol sets are gathered in The Circular Temple, in print. The Circular Temple Oracle draws one of the 360 degrees at random in answer to a question.

• The 360 Degrees · every Chandra Symbol, one page to a degree.
• The Circular Temple · the complete symbols with John’s interpretations, in print.
• The Circular Temple Oracle · ask a question; one of the 360 answers.
• About John Sandbach · sixty years of practice, and the rest of the work.