The principle of the planetary hours is set out on this website under Planetary Days and Hours, and I shall not repeat it. These notes are for members who have begun to use the hours and have met the usual difficulties. They are arranged in the order in which the questions reach me.
Learn the order from the star
Do not learn the hours from a printed table. Draw the star of the Seal, write the seven planets around it in the order of their speed, and trace the days with a finger until the order is in the hand. A member who can draw the star can rebuild every table in the Guild on the back of an envelope. A member who relies on a table is lost when the table is in another room.
A worked example
Suppose a work of Mercury is to be done in Chicago on a Wednesday in the middle of May. Sunrise is at 5:28 and sunset at 20:08 by the clock.
- Daylight lasts 14 hours and 40 minutes, which is 880 minutes. One twelfth of that is a little over 73 minutes. That is the length of each hour of the day.
- The night is what remains of the twenty-four hours: 560 minutes. One twelfth of that is a little under 47 minutes.
- Wednesday is the day of Mercury, so the first hour, from 5:28 to about 6:41, is Mercury's.
- The eighth hour of the day is Mercury's again. It begins seven day-hours after sunrise, at about 14:01, and ends at about 15:15.
- The third hour of the night is the next. It begins two night-hours after sunset, at about 21:41, and ends at about 22:28.
A member with ordinary employment will see at once why the third hour of the night is the one most used in the Guild.
Use the clock you live by
Summer time makes no difference whatever, provided that the sunrise and sunset you use are given on the same clock you will be reading when you light the lamp. The sun does not know what the clock says. Nearly every error I am sent comes from mixing a sunrise in one reckoning with a watch set to another.
The southern hemisphere
Nothing changes. Sunrise is sunrise, and the day belongs to the same planet in Wellington as in Bergen. Only the seasons are reversed, so that the long hours of the day fall in December.
High latitudes
Here there is a real difficulty. At Bergen at midsummer the sun is above the horizon for some nineteen hours. An hour of the day lasts ninety-five minutes and an hour of the night twenty-five. Farther north the sun does not set at all, and the reckoning fails altogether.
Nordlys Chapterhouse has settled the matter for itself in a practical way. Whenever the hours of the night would fall below thirty minutes, its members divide the day evenly, twelve hours to either side, from six in the morning by local solar time. They note in the Record which reckoning was used. Their Records do not suggest that anything was lost, and Margit Anselm, who was born farther north still, approved the practice in a letter of 2014, written when the Chapterhouse was still a Workroom, which it keeps framed.
Day or night?
The old sources make no distinction between the hours of the day and those of the night. The custom of the Guild, which is only a custom, is to do by day the works that are meant to be seen, such as consecrations and anything concerning one's standing in the world, and by night the works that are inward: divination, scrying and the invocations.
What the hours do
I have computed tables for the Guild for eleven years and am often asked whether I think the hours matter. I can only report what the Records suggest. The day seems to matter more than the hour. The hour seems to matter more to the quality of the practitioner's attention than to the outward result. And the members who keep the hours carefully tend also to be the members who prepare carefully, arrive on time and close properly, so that it is hard to say which virtue is doing the work.
Anselm thought the question could not be separated, and was content to leave it so. Keeping the hour, she said, is a way of keeping an appointment. One does not ask whether the appointment would have gone as well had one been late. One is simply on time.