Decanal Iconography and Natural Materials in the Sacred Book of Hermes to Asclepius

There is no abstract, here are the initial lines of the paper:

“In his polemical work against Christianity, written in 178, the Greek philosopher Celsus (in Origen C.Cels. 8.58) wrote that according to the Egyptians every part of the human body has been put under the charge of 36 daemons or heavenly gods, whose names are invoked in times of sickness in order to treat the sufferings of their subordinate parts.

Celsus assuredly is referring to the decans (Gk. δεκανός). In Egyptian astronomy the decans were single stars or clusters of stars which were used to mark the hours of the night and divide the 360-day Egyptian year into ten-day intervals, with the exclusion of the five epagomenal days.”