The Seven Days
Why Saturday belongs to Saturn and Sunday to the Sun: the old planetary order hidden in every week.
The lecture, painted and spoken
Watch The Seven Days
The first three ideas play for anyone. Members watch all twelve, and every idea is written out below.
Your plan plays the whole lecture, all twelve ideas.
The twelve ideas
Each idea is one chapter of the film: its headline is the caption on the painting, and its words are what the Oracle says. The tag says what kind of claim it is: a fact from history, what a tradition teaches, what a symbol stands for, or a question for you.
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Fact
Seven lights wander the sky.
The ancients counted seven moving lights: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Everything else in the night sky kept its place.
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Fact
They were ranked by their speed.
Ranked from the slowest to the swiftest, they run Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon. This is called the Chaldean order.
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Fact
Every hour was given a ruler.
Astrologers of the Roman age gave every hour of the day and night to a planet, in that order, one after another, around the clock.
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Fact
Count the hours, and a new day begins.
Give Saturn the first hour and count twenty-four hours through the seven. The first hour of the next day falls to the Sun, and the next day to the Moon.
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Fact
The first hour names the day.
The planet of each day's first hour gave the day its name: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus. It is the week we still keep.
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Fact
A Roman historian explained it.
The historian Cassius Dio, around 200 AD, explained the planetary week this way, as a custom that had begun in Egypt and spread through the whole empire.
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Fact
English kept Saturn, the Sun and the Moon.
In English, Saturday, Sunday and Monday still carry Saturn, the Sun and the Moon. The other four days took the names of Germanic gods.
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Fact
Tiw, Woden, Thor and Frigg.
Tuesday is Tiw's day, for Mars. Wednesday is Woden's, for Mercury. Thursday is Thor's, for Jupiter. Friday is Frigg's, for Venus.
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Fact
French and Spanish kept the planets plain.
French and Spanish kept the planets in plain sight: mardi and martes for Mars, mercredi and miércoles for Mercury, jeudi and jueves for Jupiter, vendredi and viernes for Venus.
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Fact
The Sabbath, and the Lord's day.
The seven-day week is older still: the Hebrew week rests on the Sabbath, the seventh day. Christians kept Sunday, the day of the resurrection, as the Lord's day.
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Tradition
Planetary hours are still kept.
Traditional astrologers still keep the planetary hours, choosing Mercury's hour for letters or Venus's hour for love. The first hour of every day is always its ruler's.
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Reflection
Whose day were you born on?
Every day of the week belongs to a planet. On whose day were you born, and does that planet speak loudly in your chart?
Sources
- Cassius Dio, Roman History 37.18 to 19 (about 200 AD)
- Vettius Valens, Anthology (second century)
- Eviatar Zerubavel, The Seven Day Circle (1985)
What this lecture does not claim. Where the planetary week began is not certain. Cassius Dio gives the counting of the hours as the explanation current in his day.
The Measure of Heaven
The shapes and the numbers people have always found holy.
In the dictionary
Common questions
Can I watch this lecture for free?
The first three ideas play for anyone. Members watch all twelve, and every idea is written out below. Every plan opens the whole lecture, and every other lecture in the hall, and a plan begins with seven free days.
Who made this lecture?
The Great Almanac wrote it from the sources listed on this page and tagged every idea, so history is never passed off as teaching. The paintings were made with an image model and the voice is the Oracle’s synthesized voice, as how we use AI explains.
Does watching send anything about me anywhere?
No. The only request the film makes is each idea’s spoken line, by its fixed number, and only after you press Play. Nothing about you goes with it.
