I was inspired by astra’s tag for their MySpace-like questionnaire to write a series of my questions of my own about the decans, in the hope that peers are happy to pick them up and answer them as well, as I’m very curious to hear from others about this topic!
Here are the five questions I came up with:
How long have you been into the decans?
Which decan(s) would you say you identify with the most?
Have you ever done a decan walk?
Which decan(s) have you felt was hardest to reconcile with its zodiac sign in terms of themes?
What’s a resource (book, podcast, lecture) about the decans that you really like?
Bonus (optional but fun) question: share a meme that reminds you of a decan!
And here are my answers!
How long have you been into the decans? This made me dig into my e-mails for the receipts, lol. I got one of Austin Coppock’s classes about the decans1 in 2022. I remember getting up early in the weeks after that to get through the recordings and pause every other minute to take lots of notes. I still have the notebooks I used to do so, and appreciate being able to refer to it every once in a while. I got a lot from this class, it’s very sturdy. So it’s been a little over four years now!
Which decan(s) would you say you identify with the most? Probably Aquarius I and Gemini II… Which I guess is a little on the nose for me.
Have you ever done a decan walk? No, I haven’t! I’ve done well with monthly challenges in the past, with a prompt per day for creative stuff for instance, but committing to a year-long endeavour doesn’t feel like a good fit for my personal rhythms2. Some people do it as a group, which I find very interesting in theory, but also doesn’t seem like it would suit me, I see too much potential for enmeshment, and I value privacy around my personal spiritual experiments too much. To state the hopefully obvious, this is not to say a decan walk would be a danger for anyone and that I would discourage doing one, just personal preference with my own boundaries in mind.
Which decan(s) have you felt was hardest to reconcile with its zodiac sign in terms of themes? Probably the Sagittarius decans as a whole. Once you dig into fixed stars projected there it gets abundantly clear why Sagittarius decans are so heavy3, but if you come at it with just the themes of “it’s a Jupiter-ruled fire sign”, it can be surprising, I think. A few years ago, I wrote inspirited poetry for each of the decans during a monthly challenge4, and the Sagittarius poems were the most difficult to get out as far as I can remember. Not in terms of struggling to put into words, but just the emotional weight of it. It was all the more striking in contrast to Scorpio decans just before that, which I’d found to be a delight to write about, even though the themes were not necessarily sunshine and daisies—go figure!
What’s a resource (book, podcast, lecture) about the decans that you really like? The very obvious one is 36 Faces by Austin Coppock, so much so that it feels a little silly to mention. But it really is a great reference text I go back to regularly. I have yet to get through all the decan-focused articles from Astrologers' Co-Op but I’ve really enjoyed those I did read!
Bonus (optional but fun) question: share a meme that reminds you of a decan! This Heated Rivalry meme, for Gemini II 🤭
Thank you for reading! Tagging Whitney Hill, Caleb J McCoy, Duna Torres Martín, Shahir Suprasensory and Mrs.Kuartz if they want to pick this up! Anyone who wants to copy these questions and answer them is also of course welcome to do so.
Until next time ✨
“Exploring the decans”, from NORWAC 2020.
How very Lunar of me, I guess.
Scorpius! But also Ophiuchus and Hercules! Very intense part of the zodiac, truly.
Told you I was into those!