Elemental Forces & an Astrological Year
I haven't been very explicit about this, but it's time.
There's a standard list from a Christian dude named Cosmas of Jerusalem, where he takes "the pagans' to task for the worship of the 12 Olympians and also a collection of 36 other deities in Alexandria, and he mentions that they're assigned to "the airs". And that's a reference to the 10° segments of the Zodiac called Decans or Faces. So Cosmas is critiquing the use of an Egyptian/Hellenic calendar and time-keeping system, probably in use in Alexandria around the 2nd century AD that divides the Zodiac by decan, into 36 slices. And Cosmas goes on to list which deities go with which air/decan/face.
Why is that important? Well, every one of the thirty-six airs comes up over the eastern horizon, every day. Some of them happen fast and are called the signs of Short Ascension (Capricorn to Cancer) some of them take a long time and are called the Signs of Long Ascension (Leo through Sagittarius). The Moon passes through every decan, every month, spending less than a day in each decan. The Sun passes through every decan, spending about ten days in every decan every year.
Which means that Cosmas has given us today the necessary tools to construct a calendar of sacred hours, sacred days, and sacred 'long weeks' for a broad range of Greco-Egyptian deities in the Hellenistic era.
If we order Orphic Hymns by which deity rules which air/decan/face,, that looks something like this. The first ten degrees of each sign are shown first (0°-9° including up to 9°59'), then the second deity (10°-19°) then the third (20°-29°) We get 29 gods who have Orphic hymns. and seven that don't have Orphic Hymns assigned to them — the Litai (or prayers), Serapis, the Loimos (or spirits of sicknesses), Tolma (or daring), Phobos (or Fear), Osiris (maybe substitute an Egyptian hymn?), and Dolos (trickery).
- Aries: Aidoneus/Pluto 17 - Persephone 28 - Eros 57
- Taurus: Charis/the Graces 59 - The horae/Seasons 42 - The Litai (none)
- Gemini: Tethys 21 - Cybele 25 - Praxidike 62
- Cancer: Nike 32 - Hercules 11 - Hecate 1
- Leo: Hephaestus 63 - Isis 13 - Serapis (none)
- Virgo: Themis 78 - the Moirai 58 - Hestia 83
- Libra: The Erinyes 68 - Kairos 12 - Nemesis 60
- Scorpio: The Nymphs 50 - Leto 34 - Curetes/Korybas 37 & 38
- Sagittarius: Loimos (none) - Kore 40 - Anangke 9
- Capricorn: Asklepios 66 - Hygeia 67 - Tolma (none)
- Aquarius: Dike 61 - Phobos (none) - Osiris (none)
- Pisces: Okeanos 82 - Dolos (none) - Memnosyne 76
That's.... that's a yearly and weekly calendar, a clock, and a pagan cosmology, all rolled into one. Oh, and also an education program for training the memory, which is a cornerstone skill of magic. Additionally, I use these for the four elements: 20 (air), 21 (water), 4 (fire), 25 (earth) instead of pentagram invocations of the directions.
Oh, and as an extra little amuse-bouche, Cosmas mentions that there's another list of 60 gods, which he does not include. But! There's sixty-subdivisions of the Zodiac signs called Terms or Bounds, and there's a Chaldean version of them and an Egyptian version of them. So you can also assign any additional gods you attend to, to the terms... and build them right into the timekeeping system.
Ta-daa!
