My Decan Walk

Four months ago, I launched a second publication on Substack. The Decan Walk is a page dedicated to the decans:

In the years of braiding my devotion to astrology and tarot, I’ve found the decans to be my preferred frame of the cosmic loom. I act in wonder through the shuttle wrapped in the threads of fate, working them in and out of the weft of astrology and the warp of tarot. The pattern of my understanding with the larger celestial vision I am weaving is revealed, one line at a time.

A Woman Weaving, Seated at a Hand Loom by Kitagawa Utamaro

I have walked along with the decans for a few years, each year changing the focus on how I look through their prisms. Some years are more hidden, a personal journal practice or daily tarot pull. Some years are more public, sharing the work with my visible communities. Publishing this work every ten days on The Decan Walk page is clearly a public year. All of the reading, research and contemplation that I exchange with the decans (through the transiting astrology and the visual tarot) always builds on itself.

While I focus the decan work over on that page, I wanted to share my process of this writing over here. Some of you may subscribe to both (thank you! I hope it is helpful) but I use my primary page to write about everything else BUT the decans. I thought that I’d like to share the behind the scenes of writing about them here.

Before the walk started, I had finished teaching a 3 weekend course on the subject. That teaching series was born out of a lecture I gave for Nightlight Astrology School the summer before. That lecture was built from the previous year collaborating through conversation with other astrologers for each sign (You can watch that series on YouTube)

And a decan walk is the journey of the Sun through each part of the sky, ten degrees at a time. I’ve consciously built my decan practice (both singularly & collaboratively) with each decan, one stone at a time. This writing project is the latest layer of many years’ of work.

Since we are past the first turn of the year in the zodiac (each Cardinal sign shows a spoke on the Wheel) and moving into the steady, stable bodied place that the Sun is at home, Leo, I wanted to pause and reflect on how I’ve been building it.

The process for this year began immediately after the course I taught in January. I wanted to expand that workshop to an apprenticeship or maybe a digital guide. I had also just finished hosting a year of apprentices and loved leading that work, so I was thinking about combining the two. Third option was a book. This has been in my far vision for a while, every year getting closer. I knew that my heart wasn’t quite ready for buckling down to write…yet…so I got a flash to just host a decan walk on Substack.

I wanted to create the work, offer to those who were interested and hope that enough folks utilized the guided journey. It was a blend of researching for a book, being an apprentice guide for anyone who wanted to learn and expanded on the workshops I’d already led.

I wasn’t sure if it would be financially worthwhile, but my heart was into it. All of this work continues to build and so, while I am a practicing astrologer (I do this for a living) not all of my work pays me in dollar form. The joy of the idea was the motivating force that drowned out all doubt. If it paid or not, I decided to do it.

For weeks, I built 15 articles to pre-populate a resource guide for anyone who subscribed to the page. I wanted to explain what a decan walk is, inspire people to join and then give them a cache of references to keep them going. The skeleton of the project was this:

If the decan walk was a merry-go-round, I would be the kid on the playground that would keep pushing it along. I would keep the project moving so that it was ready for anyone to jump on and ride but also get off and do something else. I would stay and do my work, pushing long the ride, for anyone at anytime.

I wasn’t sure how it would track but without any marketing, I gained 100+ subscribers before the walk started. I’ve grown that to over 300 subscribers now without much pushing.

I want the organic nature of the guide to be here for those who want it. I realize that I don’t put a lot of energy into telling people about it, so maybe that’s why I’m writing about it over here. I don’t market like a normal person, it’s just the reality of my defiantly quirky self. Everything I build comes in waves of inspiration and double checked authentic motivation. Why do I want people to know about my decan writing?

• I’ve already secured a guest writer for the decan interview. I format their interview questions into an article & schedule it to post at the beginning of their decan. This article is hyperlinked to my decan article. It was important to me to invite others’ voices to be heard in the publication and this is how I’ve incorporated a variety of people in the container of the publication.

• I find birthdays of people throughout history who were born during this decan. I choose folks that I feel exemplify the full decan story & I love finding hidden gems of history this way

• I create a graphic with a Lewis Caroll quote (as a nod to my first astrology book author, Linda Goodman, who put Alice in Wonderland quotes in her work)

• I create a graphic for the associate tarot cards: sign ruler & decan ruler

• I include the exact dates of the decan, the transits that that decan ruler planet will have with the rest of the sky and any personal thoughts on those transits

• I locate the planetary days for the decan ruler during this time and include suggestions for planetary magic

• Include Teucer of Babylon’s quotes on the decan (earliest complete writing of the decans) as well as Austin Coppock, T Susan Chang & The Golden Dawn

• Include natal chart considerations with the decan ruling planet & the Sun

• I write 3 journal prompts for the decan time & my own key words

• I link support materials that came up for me during research: videos, books, films, essays etc that I find help elucidate the decan in an artistic way

• I find a song for the decan to add to the running playlist for the year

• Lastly, my own thoughts on the decan from experience, research & meditative insights

I work on one decan at a time, making sure that I have all of the above for each one. I usually work about one or two decans ahead of current day. For instance, we began Leo I today and I’m finishing up Leo II & Leo III this week.

Maybe I could build these articles further ahead in time, but I like to be connected to the seasons when I write. I like to publish one or two days before the decan begins to give the subscribers a day to prepare for the change in the story.

In the middle of the sign (2nd decan) I host a decan-dream class on Zoom for all paid subscribers. For this decan walk, each month I build on the previous months lectures on how to lucid dream, how to incorporate dreaming and astrology together, plant medicine and magic, animal omens and symbols etc… for Leo’s class, I will be teaching lucid dream incubation.

I teach this class in addition to the decan walk for those who financially support all of the decan work. It’s just $10 a month & subscribers get an hour+ class for that tenner. It’s recorded for playback for anyone who isn’t there live. The dream covey is building deeper work for everyone who attends and I love leading this group.

Once all of the above is complete & published, I work on the next decan and the next month’s class. As of now, I’ve written over 22K words on the decan articles (the book haunts me) so I expect I’ll write around 60K words by the end of this series.

If you know of someone who may want the structure of the decans, to have someone guide them with an email every ten days on what is going on in astrology, then share my page with them.

Spell it,

Christa