As the result of a thread in the Money Magick sub forum, and a request a few months ago from the Good Lady for tuts, I figured I’d write a tut for figuring out Planetary Days and Hours. Most of you here probably already know how to do this, and some of you may find it useful, others maybe not. This doesn’t have to be used in a strict Planetary Magick system, you can use it any way you choose. Kinda like Kabbalah.
It’s easy to do, but tedious and time consuming, and needs to be done every day, as it works off of sunrise and sunset times. You will need to know sunrise and sunset for the relevant day, as well as sunrise for the following day. This is easy to find in any local newspaper’s weather page, or any weather website.
The Planetary Days:
Monday - Moon
Tuesday - Mars
Wednesday - Mercury
Thursday - Jupiter
Friday - Venus
Saturday - Saturn
Sunday - Sun, or Sol, if you prefer
Planetary Days go from sunrise to sunrise, not midnight to midnight.
The Planetary Hours:
There are 12 daylight and 12 nighttime Planetary Hours in a Planetary Day. However, as you will see, they are NOT 12 hours of 60 minutes each. We’ll get there in a minute. The order in which the Hours go is this:
Saturn
Jupiter
Mars
Sun
Venus
Mercury
Moon
The order in which they go might look arbitrary, but it’s the descending order of the Seven Planetary Sephiroth of the Kabbalah. The first Planetary Hour of any day will be the same Planet as the Planetary Day
The Practical:
OK, let’s work through this. Today, at my location, sunrise was 5:21, and sunset is 8:21, for a total of 15 hours of daylight. Sunrise tomorrow is also 5:21, so a total of 9 hours of dark.
Remember I said the Hours weren’t 60 minutes each? Here’s why. 12 daylight Planetary Hours means we need to take total hours of daylight, converted into minutes, and divide that by 12. Sooooo, 15 hours equals 900 minutes. 900 divided by 12 is 75. Each daylight Planetary Hour is, therefore, 75 minutes. At my location, for today, it will look like this:
5:21AM begins the Hour of Mercury, since this is the Planetary Day of Mercury
6:36AM Hour of the Moon
7:51AM Hour of Saturn
9:06AM Hour of Jupiter
10:21AM Hour of Mars
11:36AM Hour of the Sun
12:51PM Hour of Venus
2:06PM Hour of Mercury
3:21PM Hour of the Moon
4:36PM Hour of Saturn
5:51PM Hour of Jupiter
7:06PM Hour of Mars
Now we need to calculate the nighttime Planetary Hours. Sunset is 8:21PM tonight, and sunrise tomorrow is 5:21. That’s 9 hours, or 540 minutes. Divide that by 12 and you get Planetary Hours of 45 minutes. We pick up where we left off with the planetary order, so:
8:21PM Sun
9:06PM Venus
9:51PM Mercury
10:36PM Moon
11:21pm Saturn
12:06AM Jupiter
12:51AM Mars
1:36AM Sun
2:21AM Venus
3:06AM Mercury
3:51AM Moon
4:36AM Saturn
Tomorrow is Thursday, so it’s Jupiter’s Planetary Day, and the first Hour, beginning at 5:21AM, will be Jupiter, followed by Mars, etc.
Whew! What a shit load of fuckin’ around! Here’s the good news; some good people have written programs and put them on teh internets!!! How cool is that?!?! You go there, enter your location, and Bob’s yer Uncle, you have the whole day laid out for you in the blink of an eye. And that, Good People of BALG, is how it’s done, and also, why I use an on-line calculator. Here’s the one I use:
[url=http://www.lunarium.co.uk/planets/hours.jsp]http://www.lunarium.co.uk/planets/hours.jsp[/url]
Here endeth the lesson.
ETA:
I should mention, for any who aren’t aware, that it doesn’t matter when you finish your working. It matters when you start it. As long as you start within the appropriate Hour, it’s OK if it runs into the next Hour. Because sunrise/sunset times are +/- a couple of minutes, I generally start five to ten minutes into an Hour. I probably wouldn’t start a working with less than 10 minutes left in the Hour.
