Via Flickr:
The three Decans of Virgo proved to be a little challenging. The Virgin, the Quill, and the Swallow were clever images:
1) A woman with a basket of flowers and fruit in the court of a temple;
2) A man kneeling with a long pen and a scroll, wearing a turban;
3) A woman with a vase of flowers and a spoon, going to the temple.
But, as you can see, the Virgin’s fruit basket has appeared twice – once in her own image, and once, when I got mixed up, in the image of the quill. I fixed this in a later version of the image by putting her hand coming up through a window in the wall behind the quill-man. But it’s not ideal.
I’m also finding that there are significant — significant! — differences between the descriptions of the Decans given by ibn Ezra, the Picatrix, and Henry Cornelius Agrippa. They’re even different from the Skinner list, which I have somewhere. And my descriptions above are also “wrong”, too, in that they don’t match the standard Decans descriptions of any one of the authors’ lists that I mention above.
Things get even more confused because it turns out that the list of ruling planets that I have for the Decans are also wrong. So one can’t even go by that arrangement in doing the layout of this symbolism.
So that’s the bad news.
if you decide to draw these for yourself, I strongly recommend laying out each page in your sketchbook with one image, and a page for notes about that image on the other side. Because it’s all too easy to get lost in what you’re doing, shifting back and forth between one picture and the other….
