Summer's Dark Arts

a creative consult sale and an ode to the subdivisions

Hello,

Summer is in full swing in Portland. On some days, a walk from the car to your friend’s apartment can drench you. I don’t drink enough water. The day winds up its swing and hits the highest temperature in the early evening, keeping us sweaty until midnight. The roses and peppers, however, are thriving. I probably have adequate vitamin D levels for the first time all year.

Summer can feel like a push-pull between lush, sunny days begging for river days; long, warm nights out; barbecues and summer vegetable abundance; and the limitations of the languorous, scorching heat. You want to fit as much as possible into the stretched-out day but the heat can be tiring, irritating. Despite summer’s possibilities, the expansion of the season can feel overwhelming, exhausting.

I feel this, similarly, with my creative work. I have been trying to consistently sit down and see what performance piece wants to birth itself through me but have also been resisting sitting down with it in equal measure. You see, every time I face the possibilities of creation condensing down into just one, I get scared. I see the void, offering me no plan or vision, just a first possible step. The rest is up to my trying, my stumbling.

The Chthonic Creative

To face the creative process is to face the void. The void not of meeting spirit alone but bringing its divines ideas down to earth without completely defying its essence. It makes me think of the 5th house and the 11th house, two temples of beneficence in our sky that oppose each other; one above the horizon and one below.

While the diurnal 11th house is known as the house of good spirit, the 5th is the house of good fortune, specifically the goodness that befalls our physical life. While the 11th holds our hopes, networks and alliances— all the connects outwardly and uplifts, the 5th describes the creations by our own hands— children, parties, games, adornment, art.

More and more I’ve been thinking about the differences between the blessings of the 5th and 11th houses, mainly through the lens of soul versus spirit. In “The Light Inside the Dark: Zen, Soul and the Spiritual Life,” John Tarrant differentiates them thusly: for spirit, “each moment is a fragment of eternity”¹ while soul “falls headlong into matter”². The lessons of Spirit culminate when “the veils that obscure our view are lifted and our oneness with God and the universe is revealed”. We realize our true, timeless essence that forever connects us, is always already connecting us, with the divine.

The soul, on the other hand, doesn’t strip away the ephemeral but instead “likes to merge—with chocolate, gardening, a fast car, a lost love”.³ While spirit reminds us of our untouched eternity, soul is “always learning, always fallible”. I feel this soul vs. spirit dynamic describes the creative process well, especially in light of the chthonic, underground qualities of the 5th house,. As Tarrant puts it, “[in] any creative process we have to go down into darkness before we can rise up,” falling deep into the cavernous limitations of physical manifestation. We may have an idea or vision for our creative practice (that would be the spirited high-mindedness of the 11th house), but the actual act of making is pure 5th house descent.

A musician puts it this way: “Whenever I am composing a new piece, it is the same. I have to go through the agony of not being able to do it”. He knows that “[the] blackness is the door of the creative process”.⁴ Put another way, to struggle to birth your art, to feel stuck or inadequate or fallible through your process, is part of this embodied journey.

Art asks that we find the transcendent beauty hidden in matter while still accepting and working with its limitations and imperfections. We don’t make art any other way.

❤️‍🔥Creative Practice Consult Sale❤️‍🔥

With Venus having recently entered my 1st house as it entered Leo, I am called to spend more time with my creative practice and helping others with their own.

In honor of Venus’s dance with my chart, I will be offering 20% off my Creative Practice consult with code “GOLDEN” while Venus is in Leo (through 8/3). This reading is for all the artists and mystics who want help developing creative routines and uncovering your crafts, your talents, your offerings. This consult is for help finding and devoting yourself to the Muses and all the earthy, embodied work it takes to wrestle spirit into matter.

Creative practice consults are for infusing play, presence and warmth into your life- the prerequisites for creativity, which exists in your meals, outfits, how you construct a day, including your actual artwork.

Together, we weave a story about how artistry and spirituality intertwine in your life and use the 3rd + 5th houses, your rising, Venus and Muse asteroid conjunctions to understand your creative signature and call on the spirits guiding your through your process.

Click the link below to become more intimate with your fertile darkness.

An Ode to the Subdivisions

When you first start learning about astrology, studying the signs is more than enough information. But as you get deeper into your practice, you begin to see whole worlds open up within a seemingly uniform archetype. For every thirty degrees contained within a zodiac sign, there are thirty diverse manifestations of its energy.

Manilius puts it this way: “For all the signs that rise possess a mixture of influences and a variety of texture. Nothing is uniform. Look at the stretches of land and sea, and rivers that course past banks of varying scenery : failings abound everywhere, and imperfection is found next to excellence”.

How do we determine the landscape contained within the individual degrees of the zodiac? Subdivisions, baby.

Through various techniques, like the bounds, decans, 12th and 9th parts and the monomoiria, we can get a better picture of the minute complex found when we zoom into a particular part within a sign.

Much of these techniques give planets or even other signs rulership within a given sign so “that heaven might everywhere display a likeness to itself, and that all the signs might have place in each other”. By finding the share of other signs and planets within one zodiac sign, “harmony prevail through the zodiac and its signs would protect one another in a common interest”. By zooming in, we again find the wholeness of the totality.

This variance within a sign also speaks to the diversity of beings born under the same star. “although their nativities occur in the same signs,” Manilius explains, “they exhibit different traits and conflicting desires…because the individual signs vary on account of the distribution of their divisions”.

I speak to the subdivisions in some form in all of my consults because they work. It’s not enough to give someone a description of their rising sign and expect them to resonate with this general archetype. Only by layering the bounds, decans, 12th parts, etc can I reflect the client’s experience and all its complexity accurately.

“The signs are mixers and acquire further influences from their fellowships,” Manilius concludes. We would do well to treat them accordingly.

Subdivisions: Decans

The decans are our storytellers, our points of magic and tell us what archetypal tale we find ourselves in. The name comes from “ten,” referring to their ten-degree segments within a sign, making 3 decans per sign and 36 in total.

In most schemes, a planet is assigned to each decan irrespective of the planet that rules the sign. The decans for Jupiter-ruled, Sagittarius, are controlled my Mercury, the Moon and Saturn, respectively. Manilius, ever the rogue, assigns actual signs as decan rulers. As such, “no sign has exclusive control over itself. All share their powers with certain signs in equal portions…and surrender the parts of which they are composed to the keeping of other signs”.

The meaning of the decans is often obtuse and mysterious. Their meaning is primarily passed down to us in the form of esoteric images, like this one from Ibn Ezra on Virgo III: “A white woman who is self-laudatory; she is wearing a dyed mantle, her hands are leprous and she is praying to God”.

Manilius tells us it it the task of the individual to reveal the mysteries each sign conceals through the decans. We can only unveil the “real influences and gifts” of a decan through our intellect, “for it is in its interior and not in its outward appearance that the divine is to be apprehended”. “Intellect” here means the interior world where earthly and divine come together, not the black box in our skulls that we currently ascribe to it.

To journey with the decans is to take a ride with one’s own mysteries and let time and one’s own sharp wisdom slowly reveal a deeper truth.

Subdivisions: The 12th Parts

One of the lesser known and understood subdivisions is also one of my favorites: welcome to the dodecatemoria or 12th parts.

Its method for subdivision is in the name: you divide each 30º sign into 12, each 2.5º section assigned to one of the zodiac signs. In this way, each sign becomes a fractal with the whole included within the part.

The first 2.5º section is ruled by the same sign, i.e. the 1st dodecatemoria of Pisces is also Pisces, while the last dodecatemoria is ruled by the sign preceding the current sign, so for Pisces the last 12th part is Aquarius. If you get confused, simply refer to a table like the one below.

Manilius tells us “the genitures differ in a single constellation, because the individual signs…modulate their respective powers in the dodecatemories”. Someone might be born with their ascendant just a few degrees off from yours, but being in the 12th part of Libra vs. the 12th part of Scorpio matters greatly to the fate of the native.

Manilius puts it this way: “for a planet will exert its influences as modified by the powers of that dodecatemory into whose territory in any given sign it has come”. Because of this zodiac within a sign, “the signs are mixers and acquire further influences from their fellowships,” leading to the wide variation we see between people of the same sign.

I delineate the 12th parts as our “secret” chart. Though we may outwardly operate as a Taurus Moon, for example, having Luna in the 12th part of Gemini will mean that beneath your comfortable, sensual exterior is a hunger for knowledge and stimulation you wouldn’t see if using the sign alone.

There’s something intimate and spiritual to the nature of 12th parts.

I always use the 12th part of the ascendant to delineate the secret desires or parts of the native that may not be readily apparent but are personally quite crucial to them.

Subdivisions: The Bounds

The terms are perhaps the most irregular and least understood subdivision of the zodiac; I couldn’t imagine my practice without them.

Each sign has five of them, each ruled by either Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and Venus. The Luminaries are not included in the bounds system. The order and degree allotment of the bounds varies from sign to sign. While Venus takes up the first 12º of Pisces according to the Egyptian system, Saturn’s term only rules the last 2º of the sign.

In some Ancient texts the bound ruler of the planet is seen as just as important as its domicile lord. Firmicus tells us that “We must observe these terms carefully; for when a planet is found in its own terms, it is just as if located in its own sign”.

Rhetorius states that when a planet is in the domicile and terms of a benefic, “it benefits the [native's] fortune” but a planet being in the domicile of a benefic but terms of a malefic “it reduces the good of the fortune”.

The actual meaning of a bound can be found in the name. Coming from the Greek “orias,” meaning “boundaries,” the bounds limit the expression of a point or planet. “There seems to be some overtone of confinement, bondage, constriction,” to the terms, as Robert Schmidt puts it.

He also likens them to the room of a house. If your Sun is in the domicile of Saturn but the bounds of Venus, for example, then it’s like the Sun is in the house of Saturn but in Venus’s room. The Sun must establish its identity under the lordship of Saturn but must then must specifically use the tools of Venus, i.e. connection, beauty, intimacy, to achieve its goal. In other words, the Sun still ultimately answers to Saturn but is limited in its expression to Venus strategies. Think: long-term relationships, toil for creativity for example.

A planet in its own bound is considered dignified because it works within its own limits and with its own tools to achieve its goal, even if ruled by a different planet.

Just as we know the head of our household better than the governor of our state, the terms may feel more intimate and speak to our day-to-day experience of a planet. I find that speaking about a placement without mentioning its bound greatly lessens my ability to speak to the client’s actual reality of a planet.

If you want to nuances of your chart to be revealed, my books are open for July. Click the link in my bio to learn more and book <3

For now, I leave you with my recommendation for the week: eat a fresh berry in the sun. Drink a glass of water while listening to your favorite song. Let it be enough.

Until next time,

Love,

Chloe

1. John Tarrant, “The Light Inside the Dark: Zen, Soul, and the Spiritual Life,” p. 14

2. Ibid, p. 16

3. Ibid, p. 17

4. Ibid, p. 164