The window is still black at five, and the kettle ticks as it cools on the ring.
Somewhere behind the roofs the sky has begun to consider grey. Not light yet. Only the idea of light, the way frost on a sill holds the memory of the night just before it gives way to water.
The clock above the stove keeps its own flat opinion. It cuts the dark into sixty even minutes and has nothing whatever to say about the sun.
The older reckoning does not work that way.
In the older reckoning, the day begins when the first bright rim of the sun clears the horizon, and it ends when the last rim slides under. Whatever length that comes to — nine thin hours in the dead of winter, sixteen swollen ones in the fat middle of summer — is cut into twelve equal pieces, and each piece is handed to one of seven planets to hold until it is done.
These are the planetary hours.
They are not sixty minutes long. They are exactly as long as the day makes them, and they stretch and shrink with the year like wet leather drying by a fire.
The Hour That Is Not Sixty Minutes
An hour on a wristwatch is a fixed thing, stamped out of metal, identical in June and December.
A planetary hour is a living measure. It is one twelfth of the light, and one twelfth of the dark, and the two are almost never the same length.
On a raw morning in the deep of the year, a day hour may run to only forty-five minutes, brief as the time it takes for a candle to gutter down past its first ring of soft wax. That same night, each hour of darkness swells to well past seventy.
At midsummer the arrangement turns over. The daylight hours grow long and golden and the night hours are little more than a held breath between dusk and the first blackbird.
This is why the method feels alive to those who work it. The hours breathe with the year rather than against it.
The Seven, and the Order They Keep
Seven wandering lights were known to the old astronomers, and only seven: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.
Set them not by brightness but by how slowly each one drifts against the fixed stars, and a particular order falls out. Saturn is slowest, a cold and distant lamp that takes years to cross a handful of constellations. The Moon is quickest, restless, changing her face every night against the window.
Slowest to swiftest, the sequence runs:
- Saturn
- Jupiter
- Mars
- The Sun
- Venus
- Mercury
- The Moon
This is usually called the Chaldean order. Everything else in the system is built upon it, the way a whole wall of dry stone rests on one buried course.
When you reach the end of the list, you begin again at the top. The wheel has no join in it.
Why the Week Runs in the Order It Does
Here is the part that tends to stop people mid-sentence, cup halfway to the mouth.
Give the very first hour after sunrise on Sunday to the Sun. Then walk the Chaldean order forward, one planet to each of the twenty-four hours, straight through the daylight and on through the dark.
When you arrive at the following sunrise, the planet whose turn has come is the Moon.
Monday. The Moon’s day.
Carry on and the same thing happens again. The hour that opens the next morning belongs to Mars, and that morning is Tuesday. After Mars comes a sunrise ruled by Mercury, then one by Jupiter, then Venus, then Saturn, and then the Sun once more.
Twenty-four does not divide evenly by seven, and the remainder of three is what shunts the sequence forward each dawn. The familiar week is nothing more than that leftover, repeated. Roman writers already set down this counting as the reason the days fall as they do, and the arrangement outlived every empire that carried it.
The week is not a list. It is a wheel of hours seen from far enough away that only the sunrises show.
The weekday rulers and what is traditionally asked of each are treated at length in days of the week in witchcraft. What follows here is the finer grain beneath them.
What You Need Before You Can Count
Very little, and none of it need be bought.
- The sunrise and sunset times for your own town, on the day you mean to work
- Paper and a pencil, or a page kept for the purpose
- The name of the weekday
The sunrise time matters more than practitioners expect. Times printed for a capital city can run twenty minutes adrift of a valley two counties away, and twenty minutes is a third of a winter hour.
Use the figures for where your own feet are. An almanac, a tide table, a printed calendar or the small column at the edge of a weather page will all serve.
Keeping your own record of the local sky, season by season, is the habit that turns this from arithmetic into practice, and it sits close to the work described in the cosmic witch.
Cutting the Daylight Into Twelve
The method is short enough to learn at a kitchen table with the salt cellar for a paperweight.
- Find sunrise and sunset for your location on that date.
- Count the minutes between them. That total is the length of the daylight.
- Divide the total by twelve. The answer is the length of one day hour.
- The first hour begins at the moment of sunrise. Add the hour length again and again to find where each one opens.
- For the night, count the minutes from sunset to the following morning’s sunrise, and divide that by twelve.
- Name the first hour of the day for the planet that rules the weekday. Then walk the Chaldean order forward, one planet to each hour, through all twenty-four.
That is the whole of it. No table bought from anyone, no software, nothing that cannot be done in pencil on the back of an envelope while the tea steeps.
A Day Worked Through, Sunrise to Sunset
Take a Sunday with sunrise at 6:12 in the morning and sunset at 8:36 in the evening.
Between them lie fourteen hours and twenty-four minutes, which is eight hundred and sixty-four minutes. Divided by twelve, each day hour runs to seventy-two minutes.
Because the day belongs to the Sun, the first hour belongs to the Sun as well, and the Chaldean order takes over from there.
- 6:12 to 7:24 — the Sun
- 7:24 to 8:36 — Venus
- 8:36 to 9:48 — Mercury
- 9:48 to 11:00 — the Moon
- 11:00 to 12:12 — Saturn
- 12:12 to 1:24 — Jupiter
- 1:24 to 2:36 — Mars
- 2:36 to 3:48 — the Sun
- 3:48 to 5:00 — Venus
- 5:00 to 6:12 — Mercury
- 6:12 to 7:24 — the Moon
- 7:24 to 8:36 — Saturn
Notice that the twelfth hour closes precisely at sunset, with the last light going copper along the gutters. If your final hour does not land on sunset, the arithmetic has slipped somewhere, and the check costs nothing.
The Twelve Hours of the Night
The dark is measured the same way, and it is not an afterthought. Half the wheel turns while the house sleeps.
From sunset at 8:36 to the next sunrise at 6:12 there are nine hours and thirty-six minutes, or five hundred and seventy-six of them, which gives night hours of forty-eight minutes each.
The sequence does not restart. It simply continues from where the daylight left it, so the first hour of Sunday night belongs to Jupiter.
- 8:36 to 9:24 — Jupiter
- 9:24 to 10:12 — Mars
- 10:12 to 11:00 — the Sun
- 11:00 to 11:48 — Venus
- 11:48 to 12:36 — Mercury
- 12:36 to 1:24 — the Moon
- 1:24 to 2:12 — Saturn
- 2:12 to 3:00 — Jupiter
- 3:00 to 3:48 — Mars
- 3:48 to 4:36 — the Sun
- 4:36 to 5:24 — Venus
- 5:24 to 6:12 — Mercury
And the hour that opens at the next sunrise falls to the Moon, and Monday begins exactly where the counting says it should.
Use tomorrow’s sunrise for the night figure rather than today’s. The difference is a minute or two, but a practice built on borrowed numbers stays slightly out of true for ever.
What Each of the Seven Is Asked For
These attributions are traditional rather than universal, and different books hand out the same planet in slightly different clothes. The fuller table of colours, herbs and metals sits in magical correspondences.
- Saturn — endings, boundaries, binding, patience, the clearing of old ground, work that must be put down and left down
- Jupiter — increase, fortune, law and contract, generosity, matters that need room to grow
- Mars — courage, severance, defence, iron, the cutting of a cord that will not untie
- The Sun — vitality, clarity, recognition, health, the hour of standing plainly in the light
- Venus — love and friendship, beauty, reconciliation, music, the making of pleasant things
- Mercury — speech and writing, study, travel, trade, letters that must be answered well
- The Moon — dreams, tides, intuition, the home, water gathered and kept
Each planet also carries an old metal — gold to the Sun, silver to the Moon, iron to Mars — and that thread is followed properly in metals in the craft.
When the Day Ruler and the Hour Ruler Agree
There is a doubling that the old tables prize.
An hour of Venus that falls on Venus’s own day is held to be the strongest expression of that planet available in ordinary time. The first hour after sunrise on Friday is one such hour, and Friday’s eighth day hour is another.
The same holds for every one of the seven. Saturn on Saturday at first light. Mercury on Wednesday. Mars on a Tuesday afternoon, with the kitchen knives still warm from washing.
This is why the first hour after sunrise carries such weight in the grimoires. It is the only hour guaranteed to match the day it stands in.
Whether you feel the difference is a question for your own record book, not for anyone else’s assurance.
The Places Where the Method Strains
The system was built by people living where the sun rises and sets in a reasonably civil manner.
Carry it far north and it begins to buckle. At high latitudes near midsummer, the twelve day hours stretch grotesquely while the night hours shrink to slivers of pale grey. Above the arctic circle, in the weeks when the sun does not set at all or does not rise at all, the arithmetic simply has nothing to divide.
Some practitioners fall back on clock hours in those weeks. Some let the planetary hours lapse until the horizon behaves again, and work instead by the phases described in moon phases.
Both answers are honest. Neither is a failure.
The other strain is the changing of the clocks. Sunrise tables usually account for it, but the hour written on your paper last month may be the wrong hour tonight, and it is worth checking rather than assuming.
When the Hour Cannot Be Kept
Most lives do not part politely to make room for a forty-eight minute window at ten past three in the morning.
Shift work, small children, a thin wall and a sleeping household — any of these can put the ideal hour out of reach, and a working done resentfully at an ideal time is worth less than one done well at a convenient one.
Take the second-best hour. There are usually two of each planet in the daylight and two in the dark, which gives four openings a day for every one of the seven.
If none of them will fit, work the day ruler alone and let the hour go. Preparing yourself properly, as set out in before the candle is lit, will carry a rite further than perfect timing ever did.
If a candle is to burn through an hour, it stays on a heatproof saucer, clear of curtain and shelf, and it is never left alone in an empty room.
Keeping a Table of Your Own
Calculating from scratch every morning grows tiresome by the second week.
Most who keep this practice write out a page for the month instead. Sunrise, sunset, the length of a day hour, the length of a night hour, and the first-hour ruler, one line to a date.
Sunrise moves by only a minute or two across several days in most seasons, so a table built on the first of the month stays serviceable for a good stretch of it, provided you are not near an equinox when the light shifts fastest.
Keep it in pencil. Keep it near the door, or folded in the back of the book you already write in.
Over a year that page becomes something more interesting than a schedule. It becomes a record of how the light behaved where you actually stood.
What the Hours Do Not Do
No hour grants an outcome.
Saturn’s hour does not end a thing that you have not, in daylight and plain speech, actually ended. Mercury’s hour does not write the letter. Venus does not make a person love you, and no arrangement of minutes has ever been a substitute for the harder ordinary work that surrounds a rite.
What the hours give is shape. A boundary in the day, a reason to stop, a small stern architecture that says: now, and not before, and only until the light has moved this far along the floorboards.
That is not a small gift. Attention has to be poured into something, and a measured hour is a good vessel for it.
The kettle has gone cold on the ring. Outside, the grey has finally arrived along the rooftops, and somewhere below the sill the first hour of the day is opening its hand.