← Encyclopedia of Embodied Energy · lesson 159/164
The sixteen faces (godheads)
Inside each of the four quarters of the gate wheel, the tradition draws a finer division: sixteen faces, which it calls godheads. Each face is a run of four consecutive gates, four faces to a quarter, so between them they cover all 64 gates exactly once. The face a person's birth Sun falls in is the most specific of the frames around their life theme.
Names and themes
The names are the tradition's own technical labels — figures from several mythologies, used as archetype tags. We keep them so that a chart of ours can be checked against anyone else's, as we keep the five type names. They are symbols, not a religious claim about anybody, and the themes beside them are written in our own words as archetypal ideas rather than devotional statements.
| Face | Gates | Its theme |
|---|---|---|
| Kali | 13, 49, 30, 55 | what has to end for anything true to begin |
| Mitra | 37, 63, 22, 36 | meeting others on terms both can keep |
| Archangel Michael | 25, 17, 21, 51 | a message delivered whether or not the room is ready |
| Janus | 42, 3, 27, 24 | looking back and forward from the same doorway |
| Maia | 2, 23, 8, 20 | what is small and unfinished, kept alive |
| Lakshmi | 16, 35, 45, 12 | abundance that arrives through grace rather than force |
| Parvati | 15, 52, 39, 53 | the long, patient work of staying with something |
| Ma'at | 62, 56, 31, 33 | order, proportion and what is due |
| Thoth | 7, 4, 29, 59 | knowledge set down so it outlives the knower |
| Harmonia | 40, 64, 47, 6 | holding two things together without flattening either |
| Christ Consciousness | 46, 18, 48, 57 | attention given without a ledger |
| Minerva | 32, 50, 28, 44 | knowing a thing, and knowing what to do with it |
| Hades | 1, 43, 14, 34 | what is buried, and what it costs to go down for it |
| Prometheus | 9, 5, 26, 11 | bringing back something that wasn't freely given |
| Vishnu | 10, 58, 38, 54 | keeping the shape of a thing through its changes |
| The Keepers of the Wheel | 61, 60, 41, 19 | cycles honoured, endings allowed to be endings |
Gates are listed in wheel order. The first four faces make up the quarter of initiation, the next four civilisation, then duality, then mutation.
How the faces are placed
Like the quarters, the faces are counted from gate 13, four gates at a time round the gate wheel. Our chart derives them from the wheel rather than from a copied list. That gives a useful check on the structure itself: sixteen runs of four, starting at the same gate as the quarters, tile the wheel exactly and nest four to a quarter with none straddling a boundary — which a misremembered list could not do.
How it is read
Only the aware Sun — the Sun at birth, on the aware side — places the face, just as it places the quarter. A face is shared by everyone born while the Sun crossed those four gates, a span of about three weeks each year, so it is a broad archetypal colour rather than a portrait. We read it as one more way of asking the life theme's question: what kind of story is this theme part of? It inclines; it does not decree, and it says nothing about anyone's beliefs.
In your chart
A reading names the face beside the life theme and its quarter. To find it yourself, take the gate of the aware Sun from the activation table and look it up in the table above.