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>By the time the Gnostic texts began to be authored, this Hellenistic astrological system was combined with the old Egyptian decanal system. Egyptian astrological speculation placed a very significant emphasis on stars they called the “decans.” Egyptian astrologers had observed constellations that ascended with the sun every ten days. The rising of the decans were used to divide time into hours. The decans were considered very powerful gods because, unlike the stationary constellations, these stars, the astrologers thought, did not stand in stations. Unlike the planets, they did not move backwards nor could they be eclipsed by the sun. Chapter six in Stobaeus’ Hermetic handbook describes the decans as stars that rule from an area just above the Zodiac signs in the sphere of the fixed stars, so that “they hold up the circle of the universe and look down on the circle of the Zodiac.” They exercise great power by slowing the circle of the universe and hastening the movement of the planets. According to Stobaeus, one of the decans, called the Bear, was thought to be centrally located in the Zodiac, functioning like the spoke of a wheel making the Zodiac revolve. The decans were the guardians of the cosmos, holding together everything and watching over the order of everything. In the Hellenistic period, the Egyptian astrologers parsed the thirty-six decans into the Zodiac by allotting three decanal gods to each of the Zodiac signs. This combination can be observed on the second- century astrological boards recovered from an old well in Grand, a village in Lorraine
>In Egyptian speculation, these gods were doubled, so that seventy-two rulers were apportioned to the Zodiac. This meant that thirty-six decans and thirty-six horoscopes were each considered rulers of every five-degrees of the Zodiac. Collectively they were identified as seventy-two spirits
