15 Du'uzi, Internet 45

Put the orange altar cloth on the outdoor altar (which required some snippage; I cannot cut cloth in a straight line to save my life) and have set out the bright-half altar set with a fresh ancestor candle and some incense. I think I'm going to go ahead and do An and Ki for the deity set, and see what An has to tell me about kingship, power, and the giving up of power.

An/Anu's symbol is also the symbol for any god in cuneiform: four thin wedges intersecting to make an eight-pointed asterisk, or, to unpack that Greek-derived term, a star. In the context of the god-symbol, it's called a dingir and it's the first sign in any deity's name in cuneiform. Now, An is the god of the sky, but it hadn't occurred to me until I was trying to figure out what color candle to use for Him that He'd have been the god of the night sky first - He's not solar, and His symbol is stellar, so it's probably be best to use a black candle. Blue would also work; He's also the god of the day sky as well as the night sky - as would white, the color of the stars themselves. As it happens, the only one of those colors I actually have on hand is white, and finding black jar candles that don't have Santa Muerta's picture printed on them around here is hard, so that's what we'll go with. But thinking of Him as the star-vault god (as well as the blue-sky god) is giving me some theological feels.

Now to find some public-domain images of Them . . .