Planetary Hours - The Planets - The White Goddess

Planetary Hours

Planetary Hours

The Planetary Hours is an ancient system in which each of the seven days is ruled and recieves influences from a certain planet.

Sunday - The Sun
Monday - The Moon
Tuesday - Mars
Wednesday - Mercury
Thursday - Jupiter
Friday - Venus
Saturday - Saturn

Each day of the week has a ruling planet, with each planet having influences and attributes. For example:

Moon - The Day of the Moon: Magical aspects: peace, sleep, healing, compassion, friendships, psychic awareness, purification, and fertility.

So the best time to do spellwork/ritual/talismans involving fertility would be on Monday on the 1st or 8th hours of Day or the 3rd or 10th hours of Night.

Hours of the Day and Night

Each planetary day is divided into two half, each with 12 hours, creating 12 Hours of the Day and 12 Hours of the Night. The first hour of the Day starts with the planet it is ruled by, so the first Hour of the Day of Monday is always The Moon. Each hour is given over to the influence of a planet in the following order.

Saturn
Jupiter
Mars
Sun
Venus
Mercury
Moon

So the 2nd hour of the Day for Monday is Saturn, the 3rd hour Jupiter etc.

Calculating Planetary Hours

There are two methods that can be used to calculate when the Planetary Hours of Day and Night start. The first method is to use midnight as the start time, with the 1st hour of day starting from 00:00 to 01:00am, the 2nd hour - 01:00 to 02:00, etc. So the 1st hour of night would be from 12:00 to 13:00. This method requires no additional calculations; however it might seem strange to have the first hour of day at midnight when the outside world is in darkness.

The second method uses sunrise as the start of each day and the Hours of the Day and sunset as the beginning of the Hours of Night. Using this method you have 2 periods of 12 hours of unequal length. In order to calculate the length of each hour for the day and night, you need to know the time of sunrise and sunset for any given day and any given location. You then divide the number of minutes from sunrise to sunset by 12 to get the length of the daylight hours.

For example: You live in London and the date is 17th July 2013, sunrise occurs at 05:03 and sunset at 21:09, with a daylight length of 16h 5m 35s (965mins 35secs).

Hours of the Day Length: 965.35 / 12 = 80 mins 26secs
Hours of the Night Length: 120 mins - 80 mins 26secs or (1440 - 965.35) / 12 = 39 mins 34secs

Planetary Influences, Atributes and Activities »