Planetary Days and Hours

Every day of the week belongs to one of the seven planets, and every hour of the day and night belongs to one of them in turn. To choose the day and hour proper to a working is the oldest and simplest form of magical timing.

The days

The names of the days still carry their planets. Sunday is the day of the Sun, Monday of the Moon, and Saturday of Saturn. The other four English names are those of northern gods who were long ago matched with the planets Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus, so that Tuesday is the day of Mars, Wednesday of Mercury, Thursday of Jupiter and Friday of Venus.

Where the order comes from

The astronomers of antiquity ranked the seven planets by the time each takes to circle the sky, the slowest first: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, the Moon. The hours are given to the planets in that order, round and round without a break. The planet that receives the first hour after sunrise gives its name to the whole day.

Because there are twenty-four hours and seven planets, the count runs three places past a full circuit every day. The ruler of each day therefore stands three places on from the ruler of the day before. Set the seven around a circle, join every third, and the result is the seven-pointed star on the Seal of the Guild.

Planetary hours are not clock hours

A planetary hour is one twelfth of the time between sunrise and sunset, or one twelfth of the time between sunset and the following sunrise. In summer the hours of the day are long and those of the night are short. In winter it is the reverse. Only at the equinoxes are all twenty-four equal to sixty minutes. To find the hours for a given day:

1. Find the times of sunrise and sunset for your own place and date.
2. Divide the minutes of daylight by twelve. That is the length of each hour of the day.
3. Divide the minutes of darkness, from sunset to the next sunrise, by twelve. That is the length of each hour of the night.
4. The first hour, beginning at sunrise, belongs to the planet of the day. The others follow in the order given above.

Note that the planetary day begins at sunrise and not at midnight. At three o'clock on what the calendar calls Friday morning it is still, for the purposes of the Art, Thursday night.

Tables of the hours

The two tables below give the planet of every hour for every day of the week. They follow the reckoning that Margit Anselm set out for the Guild in 1983. The column for today is marked.

A reckoner for the hours

Enter a date and the local times of sunrise and sunset for your own place, as given by an almanac or a weather service, and the reckoner will set out the twenty-four planetary hours with the clock times at which each begins and ends.

The reckoner needs scripting to be enabled in your browser. The tables above and the four steps given earlier will serve in its place.

The reckoner takes the following sunrise to fall at the same clock time as the last, which is accurate to within a minute or two. The arithmetic is done entirely in your own browser, and nothing you enter is sent anywhere.

Using the hours

Begin with the day alone. For the first months of practice it is enough to do works of Jupiter on Thursday and works of Venus on Friday, and to note in the Record what follows.

Then add the hour. The first and eighth hours of the day, and the third and tenth hours of the night, belong to the planet of the day itself and are counted the strongest. On a Thursday those four hours are doubly Jupiter's. A work of Mercury can be done on any day in an hour of Mercury, but it is best done on Wednesday in one.

Mind the Moon. By old custom works of increase are begun while the Moon waxes, and works of decrease, of ending and of banishing while it wanes.

Do not become a servant of the clock. A working done with full attention in an indifferent hour is worth more than a hurried one in the right hour. The hours are a discipline, not a superstition, and their first effect is on the practitioner, who must plan, prepare and arrive on time.

The hours are not luck. They are a way of keeping an appointment.

Margit Anselm, Tables of the Hours

A longer treatment, with worked examples, is given in the Journal under Notes on the Planetary Hours.