Elsie Wheeler

Elsie Wheeler gave the world one of astrology's great treasures while living a life of quiet hardship, and her chart holds both truths at once. Her Sun shines in Virgo, the sign of service, of the finely tuned analytical mind, of the soul who shines not in the limelight but by doing a job perfectly out of principle. That Sun sits in the first house, her identity worn plainly, shining simply by being herself. Born on the third of September, 1887, in Norris City, Illinois, orphaned young and confined all her life to a wheelchair by severe rheumatoid arthritis, she poured her intensity inward. Her Moon in Aries is a driven, courageous, warrior's Moon, the survivor who finds her strength in spirit rather than softness, and it rests in the eighth house, the healer's Moon, the phoenix rising again from the ashes, the psyche steeped in death, rebirth and the unseen. A Leo Ascendant gave her presence beyond her circumstances. As a spiritualist medium in the early 1920s, she channelled the imagery that became the Sabian Symbols, a set of 360 pictures still used in charts today. She died in 1938; her vision endures.