The Thebaic Calendar

The zodiac circle holds three hundred and sixty degrees, and the year holds roughly three hundred and sixty days. On that coincidence a very old tradition built something curious: a calendar made of images, one for every degree. Not a calendar that marks dates, but a series that gives each degree of the circle a small scene described in words. A woman looking at herself in a mirror, a man hoeing the ground, a bird holding a snake under its claws, a heap of gold, silver and lead.

This series is called the Thebaic Calendar, and its entries are called monomers, meanings attached to a single degree. If you have already read the chapter on symbolic degrees in the guide to the tools of the tradition, you know which family this belongs to. Here we go deeper: how the series is put together, what you can do with it when you see it applied to your own chart, and why the numbering of the degrees carries an argument worth knowing about.

Your chart page has a section for it. For the twelve main points of the chart, meaning the Sun, the Moon, the planets, the Ascendant and the Midheaven, the app takes the exact degree each one sits on and shows you the image matching that degree. Nothing else: the phrase as the tradition hands it down, with no commentary and no automatic explanation. That is deliberate. These images work when you look at them and think them over, not when somebody translates them into a diagnosis for you.

One thing is worth saying straight away, because people get it wrong so often: the Thebaic Calendar is not a daily horoscope and has nothing to do with prediction. It does not tell you what will happen on a given date. What it gives you is an image tied to one precise point of your birth chart, and it leaves you the work of seeing how it resonates. This is material to think about yourself with, and it deserves to be taken in that spirit.

  • One image for every degree
  • How to read your own monomer
  • Series and numbering