About the name

Dendera is a temple town on the Nile in Upper Egypt, home to a great temple of the goddess Hathor.

On the temple’s roof stands a small chapel to Osiris. Its ceiling carried a sky carved in sandstone: a disc of constellations held up by standing figures, with the twelve signs of the zodiac, the five planets then known, two eclipses, and the decans, the star groups Egyptians used to count the hours of the night.

It was carved around 50 BC, in the reign of Cleopatra VII. Its design draws on Babylonian, Egyptian and Greco-Roman astronomy at once: one sky, drawn by more than one culture. The relief was cut from the ceiling in 1821 and has been in Paris since 1822. It is now in the Louvre.

Beside the temple stood a sanatorium. The sick came to bathe in its sacred water and to sleep there, hoping the goddess would send them a healing dream.

Why we chose it

Dendera sets astrology’s traditions side by side, each in its own frame, the way that ceiling holds several skies at once. And like the sanatorium, it starts from a hope: that a chart is a place to begin, not a verdict, and that the choices stay with you.