Kavad 4.8 – making sense of Decans

Kavad 4.8 – making sense of Decans
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Ok, this is a quick post to show what’s been occupying my time the last few days. I’ve been reading up on the Decans, because I want them to be part of the Kavad… only, it turns out that they’re a ghastly mess of a system.

There’s evidence that there was something like a Decanate system in Egypt — thirty-six gods ruling over 10 (or sometimes 11) days each. The systems got exported to Babylonia, and probably from there to Hindu astrology, where it became hugely popular. Each face was further subdivided into three “munificences”, so that there was the Sign, and then its three decans, and then nine of these ‘officials’. The idea was that this was a spirit court of all the different layers of officials….

ANYWAY, it hardly seems to matter. Here’s the first Decan of Scorpio. None of the image descriptions from the major sources match each other. They’re not even closely related enough that you could borrow symbols from one and another to add to a third, to make a composite. And they’re all like this.

There’s three basic ways to solve this kind of mess:

1) Pick one person’s list, and stick to it.
2) Pick one person’s list, make that primary, and include a symbol or two from one other source’s list.
3) Sod it for a game of soldiers, and make a completely new list!

I’m unlikely to do #1 or #3… Option #2 is pretty likely. What do you readers think?

Kavad 4.8 – Decans of Virgo sketches

Kavad 4.8 – Decans of Virgo sketches
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Via Flickr:
The three Decans of Virgo proved to be a little challenging. The Virgin, the Quill, and the Swallow were clever images:

1) A woman with a basket of flowers and fruit in the court of a temple;
2) A man kneeling with a long pen and a scroll, wearing a turban;
3) A woman with a vase of flowers and a spoon, going to the temple.

But, as you can see, the Virgin’s fruit basket has appeared twice – once in her own image, and once, when I got mixed up, in the image of the quill. I fixed this in a later version of the image by putting her hand coming up through a window in the wall behind the quill-man. But it’s not ideal.

I’m also finding that there are significant — significant! — differences between the descriptions of the Decans given by ibn Ezra, the Picatrix, and Henry Cornelius Agrippa. They’re even different from the Skinner list, which I have somewhere. And my descriptions above are also “wrong”, too, in that they don’t match the standard Decans descriptions of any one of the authors’ lists that I mention above.

Things get even more confused because it turns out that the list of ruling planets that I have for the Decans are also wrong. So one can’t even go by that arrangement in doing the layout of this symbolism.

So that’s the bad news.

if you decide to draw these for yourself, I strongly recommend laying out each page in your sketchbook with one image, and a page for notes about that image on the other side. Because it’s all too easy to get lost in what you’re doing, shifting back and forth between one picture and the other….

Taiji day 123: in my father’s house

Doing tai chi this morning in my Dad’s house was weird. It’s always weird. This is the house I sorta grew up in, so there’s this undertone of familiarity about it, and yet I haven’t lived here in decades. The ceilings are too low for a good stretch on a couple of postures. I should have gotten dressed and done the work in the back yard, which is what I usually do, I don’t know why I didn’t, but it just seemed like a more urgent thing to get done today and do it right away than usual.