Face

Meaning

Each sign has three faces of 10°, thirty-six around the zodiac. Each face has a planet as its ruler, taken in turn from the Chaldean order: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon. The count starts with Mars at 0° Aries, then the Sun at 10° and Venus at 20°, and runs on round the signs.

The Chaldean order ranks the seven planets from the slowest to the fastest, as they appear from the Earth. Thirty-six faces make five rounds of seven and one more, so Mars rules both the last face of Pisces and the first of Aries. The sequence closes on itself without a break.

A planet in its own face holds the smallest of the five essential dignities, worth one of William Lilly’s points. It is the faintest kind of support: enough to keep a planet from being peregrine, not enough to give it real strength. Tradition reads it as a foothold rather than a home.

Face and Decan name the same 10° thirds of a sign. The words differ in practice because two ways of giving them rulers exist side by side.

In practice

• The face ruler is one of the planets with a say over a degree, with the rulers of the sign, the exaltation, the triplicity and the term.
• A planet in its own face, such as Mars between 0° and 10° Aries, adds one point to whatever else it holds.
• A planet with nothing else but a face is lightly placed. Tradition reads it as getting by on little, and looks to its house, aspects and dispositor for help.
• Faces are fine-grained, and a small error in the birth time can move a planet, or the Ascendant, into the next one.

Across traditions

• The decans of modern astrology give each third of a sign to the ruler of a sign of the same element. The first third of Aries goes to Mars, the second to the Sun (Leo), the third to Jupiter (Sagittarius).
• Indian astrology uses the same idea in its drekkāṇa: the sign itself, then the signs fifth and ninth from it, rule the three parts.

Origin and history

The thirty-six decans began in Egypt as groups of stars rising one after another through the night. Egyptians used them to tell the hours and to mark the ten-day weeks of their calendar. In the Hellenistic period they were fitted to the zodiac as its 10° divisions, the Greek prosōpa, faces.

The Chaldean order that rules them is the ancient order of the planets by distance and speed. Laid out over the hours of the day, the same order gives the planetary hours and the order of the weekdays. Lilly, in Christian Astrology (1647), keeps the Chaldean faces and scores a planet in its own face at one point.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune uses the Chaldean faces: ten degrees each, ruled in the Chaldean order from Mars at 0° Aries. A traditional planet in a face it rules earns one of Lilly’s points, added to its other dignities and debilities. The Dignities table names the face ruler of each of the seven planets’ degrees.

The decans of Ulune’s readings are a different thing, and the tables never mix the two. The readings use the decans by element, with modern rulers. So between 20° and 30° Aries, Venus rules the face while Jupiter rules the decan. Without a birth time, a planet that could cross into another face during the day has its dignities marked ~.

Correspondences