The Degree Engine
Every system on this site divides the same 360°. Pick a degree and read it in all of them at once.
The zodiac, the decans and the 72 angels are not three traditions that happen to rhyme — they are three resolutions of one circle. The same 360 degrees split into 12 signs of 30° each, 36 decans of 10° each, and 72 angels of 5° each — and every one of those divisions comes out exact, with nothing left over. That is what makes a degree a real key rather than a resemblance. Give the page one number and it returns everything standing at it.
What it computes
- 01Everything starts from one number: a degree from 0 to 360, where 0° is the start of Aries. When the page opens, it is set to where the Sun stands right now.
- 02To find the sign, divide the degree by 30. For the decan, divide by 10. For the angel, divide by 5 and add one. All three answers come from the same single number, so they can never disagree with each other.
- 03The angel's record supplies its psalm, incense, stone, choir, archangel, weekday and shadow. Checked before building and re-run against the live data on 2 September 2026: take any angel's number, subtract one, multiply by five — you land exactly on the sign and degree band that angel's own record claims. That check passes for all 72 angels, with not one mismatch.
- 04The decan's record supplies the tarot minor, its Lord title, the sephirah, the divine name and the planetary day. Checked too, and re-run the same night: every decan holds exactly two angels — the first decan holds angels 1 and 2, the second holds 3 and 4, and so on cleanly through all 36.
- 05The letter comes from what the decan's own record says, not from counting letters around a wheel. Those 36 decans resolve to exactly 12 distinct letters — the twelve zodiacal Simples, one per sign. The re-run added a third check the original did not make: each of those twelve is the same letter the 22-letter table says rules that sign. Two independently written tables, twelve agreements out of twelve.
- 06Your natal Sun and the Sun's position now are placed on the same dial, because they are measured in the same units.
How to read it
Read outward from the centre as going from coarse to fine: the sign is the 30° mood, the decan the 10° flavour with its tarot minor, the angel the exact 5° window. They are not three opinions — they are one position described at three magnifications. The progress bar shows where inside its 5° band the degree actually falls.
What it does not claim
The dial itself is exact, and the Sun's current position comes from a standard astronomical calculation (Meeus), good to about a hundredth of a degree — so even degrees right on a boundary are trustworthy to within minutes of arc. Separately, the letter assignment follows one tradition: the Golden Dawn, the Gra recension and the Ari do not all agree on which letter takes which sign, and this site states one arrangement consistently rather than claiming it is the only correct one.
Where do the degrees and the decans come from?
The 360° circle is older than astrology. Babylonian astronomers counted in sixties — the same habit that still gives us 60 minutes and 60 seconds — and their ideal calendar of twelve 30-day months made a circle of 360 steps, one step for roughly one day of the Sun’s travel along the . The twelve 30° signs are the same idea kept: twelve months laid onto the sky. So the arithmetic this page runs on — 360 split by 30, by 10, by 5 — was fixed thousands of years ago, long before anyone attached meanings to the slices.
The 36 began in Egypt, and they began as clocks, not symbols. Egyptian sky-watchers followed 36 star groups that rose one after another through the night; every ten days or so a new one took over the pre-dawn sky, which is how the year fell into 36 stretches of ten days — decan is from the Greek word for ten. Tables of these stars painted inside coffin lids some four thousand years ago are among the oldest timekeeping devices we have. When Egyptian star-lore met Babylonian astrology in the Hellenistic world, the 36 star-clocks were fused onto the zodiac as the 10° segments this dial still shows, three to a sign.
Everything laid on top of that grid is attribution, and each layer has a date. Hellenistic and medieval astrologers gave every decan a planetary ruler and a vivid image — the magical handbooks of the Middle Ages describe the images one by one. Then, in the late nineteenth century, matched the 36 numbered — the twos through tens of the four suits — to the 36 decans and titled each card its Lord. That is exactly where the card and Lord on this page’s decan panel come from. The 10° arithmetic is measurement; the cards and titles riding on it are a tradition’s choice, shown here as inherited correspondence, not as proven fact.
Why one planet rules two decans in a row
The decans’ planetary Lords are not chosen one by one — they are dealt out in a repeating loop called the : Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon, from the slowest-moving light in the sky to the fastest. The traditional deal starts at the first decan of Aries with Mars and simply keeps going around the circle.
But 36 does not divide by 7 — it is 7 × 5 + 1 — so the loop comes out uneven: Mars lands on both the last decan of Pisces and the first decan of Aries, back to back across the year’s seam. The old astrologers saw the wrinkle and kept it, reading the doubled Mars as the raw push needed to end one year and begin the next. Take or leave that reading — the unevenness itself is honest arithmetic, exactly what happens when a seven-beat cycle is wrapped around 36 slots.
Ask it anything below — a degree, a sign, an angel, a card, a letter — or drag the slider and click the rings of the dial itself. The panels beside the dial always read the one selected degree, from the 30° sign down to the exact 5° .
One circle, drawn three times over. Every ring is the same 360°, cut finer as you go outward — so a single position is a sign, a decan and an angel at once. Click any band to jump the reading to its middle. 0° Aries sits at the left and the degrees run anticlockwise, matching the Living Wheel elsewhere on the site.
The number in the middle is the degree within its sign (0–30), not the degree round the whole circle; the small line beneath gives the full 0–360 figure, written λ, the astronomer’s letter for it.
Sephirah — which of the ten stations of the Tree of Life this decan answers to (the decan table spells Tiferet “Tipheret”; same sphere). Letter — the Hebrew letter ruling the whole sign, so all three of a sign’s decans share it. Major — that letter’s trump card. Planet in sign — the decan’s traditional ruler, dealt out in the . Divine name — the name of God traditionally assigned to that sphere. Planetary day — the weekday belonging to that ruler.
Shadow — Reckless impulsivity; forcing outcomes
Shares this decan with (angel 2).
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