Thirty-six faces,
not twelve signs.

Where they come from

The decans are older than the zodiac. Ancient Egyptian astronomers divided the sky into thirty-six sections, each marked by a star or small group that rose just before dawn for roughly ten days a year. Thirty-six times ten is three hundred and sixty, which gave Egypt a working calendar and the sky a set of ten-day markers long before anyone had drawn a twelve-sign wheel over it.

When Hellenistic astrology absorbed the Babylonian zodiac, the thirty-six decans were mapped onto it three to a sign, and they have been part of the tradition ever since — under several competing schemes for which planet or sign governs which face.

The system used here

This site uses the triplicity scheme, which is the one most modern practice defaults to. Each face answers to a sign of the same element, taken in order:

• The first face answers to the sign itself. It is the sign at its most undiluted.
• The second face answers to the next sign of the same element — so the second face of Aries answers to Leo.
• The third face answers to the one after that — the third face of Aries answers to Sagittarius.

There is an older and equally respectable alternative, the Chaldean scheme, which assigns the seven visible planets to the thirty-six faces in a repeating order beginning with Mars in the first face of Aries. It gives different answers. Neither is more correct; this site uses the triplicity scheme because it is the one that connects cleanly to the elements, and it says so rather than presenting one school as the fact.

Why they matter to a reading

A Sun sign is a thirty-day window. Inside it, everybody gets the same paragraph — which is the single most common and most reasonable objection to Sun-sign astrology. The faces are the tradition's own answer to that objection, and they are a genuine one: they triple the resolution using nothing but the birth date that was already given.

The compatibility reading uses them as a second term. The angle between two Sun signs carries most of the score; the angle between the two faces adjusts it. Without that adjustment every Aries-and-Leo pairing on earth would return one identical number, which is exactly what the first version of this site did.

All thirty-six

How each sign moves across its three faces

A face is only interesting beside the other two. Read in order, each sign’s three faces are a progression rather than three separate labels — the same material at three distances from its own beginning. That shape is the one thing this page can say and a single sign’s page cannot, because each of those sees only its own third of the wheel.

• Aries — Impulse alone, then impulse with an audience, then impulse with a destination. The sign gets no calmer across the month, only better aimed.
• Taurus — Appetite, then discrimination, then construction. The same steadiness acquires first a standard and then a purpose.
• Gemini — Curiosity, then fairness, then detachment. The talk starts as play, learns to weigh both sides, and ends up observing itself.
• Cancer — Retreat, then depth, then care at a distance. The shell hardens, floods, and finally learns to hold somebody else’s water instead of its own.
• Leo — Warmth, then discipline, then a cause. The performance acquires a technique and then something worth performing for.
• Virgo — Correction, then measurement, then patience. The critical eye is trained first on the fault, then on the standard, then on the long repair.
• Libra — Balance, then intensity, then flight. The scales are held, then loaded, then abandoned for the horizon.
• Scorpio — Depth, then dissolution, then survival. The sign goes under, loses its edges, and comes back with a structure.
• Sagittarius — The horizon, then the plan, then the argument. Enthusiasm learns logistics and then learns to defend itself.
• Capricorn — The climb, then the field, then the room. Ambition acquires patience and then acquires people.
• Aquarius — The rule, then the crowd, then the boundary. Distance becomes company and then becomes a limit again.
• Pisces — The dissolve, then the tide, then the shore. Formlessness is fed, then moved, and finally given an edge to break on.

Finding yours

Take the day of the month you were born, count from the first day of your sign, and divide by ten: days one to ten are the first face, eleven to twenty the second, twenty-one onward the third. That is accurate to within a day, which is close enough for everything on this page.

If you want it exact — and near a boundary it is worth being exact — the sidereal tool prints the Sun's longitude to the arcminute, and the face falls straight out of it.