Face/Decan

fays / DEK-an

Definition

A face is a minor essential dignity — a small kind of sign-based strength — built on splitting each sign into three 10-degree slices. Each sign holds three 10° faces (Greek prosopon, Latin facies, also called the Chaldean decanate), and every face gets a planetary ruler drawn from the Chaldean order of the planets — Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon. The sequence starts with Mars on the first face of Aries and runs unbroken through all 36 faces of the zodiac.

In Tradition

Hellenistic and traditional Western astrologers rank face as the weakest of the five essential dignities — just enough to keep a planet from being judged peregrine, meaning it has no dignity at all. In horary, the question-answering branch, the face ruler is read for descriptive color rather than real strength. In the Lehman tradition, a birth-chart planet in its own face points to an area of preoccupation or worry rather than to genuine capacity.

In Practice

Astrologers find the face ruler at a planet’s exact degree and award one point in the Lilly-tradition tally. Because face is the weakest dignity, it usually works as a tie-breaker that keeps a planet off peregrine status rather than as positive evidence. In horary, the face ruler describes the look, surroundings, or mood of the person or matter in question, and is sometimes used for timing by counting degrees. Face is not the same as the Egyptian decanal divisions, which gave animal- or human-headed images to those same 10° slices and survived in pictorial and magical writing alongside the planetary face rulers.

Historical Origin

The 10-degree decanal slices begin with Egyptian decanal star tables (from about 2400 BCE onward) that tracked stars rising with the dawn; the overlay of planetary rulers in Chaldean order is a Hellenistic development attested in Dorotheus, Valens, and Firmicus Maternus. Lehman’s Essential Dignities records Ramesey’s face-by-face delineations, Lilly’s use of faces in his eclipse work, and Wing’s use of them in weather forecasting.

Further Reading