#planetary timing

[scryhard]

Planetary Hours Are a Scam, Part I: How They Work

(a poetic user’s guide to a bureaucratic magical system that refuses to die no matter how many calendars we invent)

Somewhere between ancient Babylon and that astrology app that keeps trying to sell you a birth chart consultation, there exists a timekeeping system so absurdly baroque, so mathematically cursed, and so gloriously unnecessary... that I use it anyway. 

Welcome to my explanation of planetary hours: the most chaotic-beautiful form of cosmic micromanagement you never asked for, but are now, thinking about.

This is Part I of a two-part descent into the time-spiral. I’ll explain how this whole mess actually works, from Mesopotamian priesthoods doing celestial admin at 3 a.m., to Renaissance grimoires full of planetary HR schedules, maybe even your own haunted Google Calendar.

Part II is where I explain why I still use this system, which is entirely built out of ancient math poetry and bureaucratic vibes.

And Part III is just a reference, don’t worry.

But first:  What even are planetary hours? And why are they so annoying???

Section One: What Are Planetary Hours, and Why Are They So Extra

The Architecture of the Planetary Hour System

Okay. So. Planetary hours. At its root, this is ritual timekeeping. We’re not measuring seconds here, we’re measuring vibes. It’s about the mood of the light. Not how fast your clock ticks, but how it feels to exist under a certain slice of sky.

Here’s how it works: You divide daylight and nighttime into twelve segments each, no matter the season. (Yes, that’s right. Summer daylight hours? Long. Winter daylight hours? Short. Deal with it.) These are called unequal hours or temporary hours, because they literally change in length every damn day. Why make time easy when you could make it ✨a metaphysical puzzle✨.

A summer planetary “hour”? Could be 80 minutes.

A winter one? Maybe 45.

Time isn’t a rectangle. 

Time is a squiggly line that conforms to only the sun.

This system defiantly isn't going to be on your watch. It’s here for your skin, your shadows, and the way the light hits your floorboards at 4:00 p.m. and makes you feel something.

Every day begins with the planet that rules it:

Sunday = Sun

Monday = Moon

Tuesday = Mars

etc., etc., you get it, classical astrology time.

And then, the hours cycle through the Chaldean order: Saturn → Jupiter → Mars → Sun → Venus → Mercury → Moon (and then back to Saturn, like a weird cosmic conga line)

This order doesn’t just rule the hours. It’s why the seven-day week even exists. Yes. You can thank ancient Mesopotamian time nerds for Mondays. (And maybe also blame them.)

This isn’t time as chronology. This is time as character... With a personality disorder.

The Chaldean Order: Imperial Cosmology in a Spiral 

Let’s get one thing straight: The Chaldean order isn’t really logical. It’s about how fast they appear to move from Earth. Because obviously the speed that a celestial body vibes across the sky is more important than, like, actual astronomy and math.

So you get this majestic lineup:

Saturn (slow grandpa vibes)

Jupiter (big benevolent gas uncle)

Mars (knife-wielding cousin)

Sun (only child syndrome)

Venus (hot and slightly feral)

Mercury (chaotic neutral in rollerblades)

Moon (frantic toddler made of tears)

Repeat. Forever. Spinning like a magical rolodex that’s also judging you.

This order was developed by Babylonian priest-astronomers, aka Chaldeans. Note: “Chaldean” is not an ethnicity here. It’s a title. As in: “Hello, yes, I am a licensed professional sky-stalker.” (They got paid to stare at the stars and overanalyze. My dream job, honestly.)

Later, the Greeks and Romans came along, saw the vibes, and said: Yes, and what if we added twelve more layers of overthinking? (So they did.) From this cosmic filing system we inherited:

the planetary hour sequence

the structure of the seven-day week

basically the entire skeleton of Western astrological magic, and also your burnout cycle

This wasn’t really about fact. It was about usefulness. A cosmology designed to generate rhythm. To serve ritual. To set the tone. It’s not about the facts. It’s about the vibes. 

📖 Rochberg, The Heavenly Writing (2004)

Unequal Hours: Pagan Timekeeping and the Rejection of Mechanical Time 

Before clocks showed up and started gaslighting entire civilizations into believing time was a fixed, industrialized grid people measured time the old-fashioned way: By light, shadow, vibe.

They used what are called unequal hours (or if you're feeling Latin about it, horae temporales). This system was everywhere, Egypt, Babylon, Greece, medieval Europe, and it worked like this:

You divide the daylight into twelve parts. You divide the night into twelve parts. But daylight in winter is shorter than daylight in summer, so... surprise: An “hour” in January? Maybe 40 minutes. That same “hour” in July? Try 80.

And yes, they were fine with that. No one had an existential crisis over it. No one was screaming “but I’m LATE” because the sun was in charge, not your Google Calendar.

This was seasonal time. Embodied time. Cyclical, intuitive, anti-capitalist time.

It wasn’t “inefficient.” It was reverent. The ancients weren’t late. The sun was just in a different mood that day.

📖 Barton, Ancient Astrology (1994); Hannah, Time in Antiquity (2009)

Diurnal vs. Nocturnal: Time as a Divided Body 

Planetary hours don’t just pass through the day like normal time. They split it in half like a dramatic divorce.

Diurnal = sunrise – sunset

Nocturnal = sunset – sunrise

Each half runs through the same Chaldean cycle, but the vibe resets at twilight. Like two timelines running parallel. Siblings who refuse to speak to each other but still share a calendar.

Day and night aren’t just hours with different lighting. They’re fundamentally different species of time. And this division isn’t arbitrary, it echoes deep magical and medical frameworks:

In humoral medicine, it’s hot/dry vs. cold/wet

In alchemy, it’s Sun (active, golden, sulfur) vs. Moon (receptive, silver, mercury)

In ritual logic, it’s:

day = offerings, illumination, manifestation

night = banishings, shadows, unmaking

Modern time is a circle, repetitive, mechanical, looping. But planetary time? Planetary time is a spiral: It comes back around, but never quite the same.

It moves with rhythm, not precision. A cosmic playlist that reshuffles itself every day.

Calculating Planetary Hours: A Ritual in Itself 

Okay, so how do you actually calculate planetary hours? Here’s the ✨vintage ✨ method:

Find your local sunrise and sunset times.

Divide both the daylight and the night into 12 equal slices (yes, that means two different hour lengths every day).

Assign the first daylight hour to the planet that rules the day (Sunday = Sun, Monday = Moon, etc.).

Continue in Chaldean order until you run out of hours or patience.

Cry softly. Light a candle. Keep going.

Yes, there are apps now. (Yes, I use them. I am weak. Leave me alone.) But back in the day? The math was the magic.

The Picatrix and the Heptameron didn’t give you a shortcut. They expected you to observe the sky. To do the calculations by hand. To make eye contact with the sun like a confused but dedicated acolyte.

Because here's the thing: Doing the math was a devotional act. It wasn’t just about getting the right planetary hour. It was about staying in communication with the sky.

Planetary hours were never meant to be easy. They were meant to make you look up.

📖 Warnock, Secrets of Planetary Magic (2004)

Section Two: A Brief History of This Cosmic Bureaucracy 

Babylonian Astrology & Chaldean Origins 

Let’s rewind a few millennia to Babylon, where the priest-astronomers were not messing around.

These weren’t just your average guys in robes waving at the stars. They were tracking celestial movement like divine memos, because the planets weren’t just pretty lights. They were messages. Orders. Omens. Like a Cosmic HR, but make it ✨theocratic.✨

Astrology wasn’t a hobby. It was state infrastructure.

Religion? Check.

Politics? Oh, absolutely.

Weirdly formal moon-based scheduling? Obviously.

Taxes? Probably planetary too.

In this worldview: The planet isn’t just a body in space it’s a behavior in the divine. (Yes, this is your cue to spiral into metaphysical dread.)

Planets were gods. Time was sacred. And astrology was how you kept the universe from filing a complaint against your city/state.

📖 Rochberg (2004); Pingree, “The Yavanajātaka of Sphujidhvaja” (1975)

Hellenistic Astrology & Greek Timekeeping 

Enter: Hellenistic Alexandria, where cultural fusion was the vibe and everyone was trading gods, charts, and metaphysical spreadsheets.

Here, Egyptian, Persian, and Greek systems collided and birthed what we now call horoscopic astrology aka, when math met mysticism and said “we should start a cult.”

The Greeks, ever the enthusiastic overthinkers, brought some serious tools to the table:

Standardized zodiac charts (we love a labeled diagram)

Planetary dignities (astrological ranking system, very dramatic)

Stoic philosophy’s emotional damage (literally who asked)

But here’s the best part:

Even as astrology got more technical. More math, more rules, more "align this with Platonic ideals" planetary hours were like: “nah.”

They stayed chaotic, poetic, and ritual-focused. A little piece of Mesopotamian candlelight tucked inside an increasingly bureaucratic cosmos.

Ritual time surviving inside rational math. Messy. Sacred. Beautiful. We love to see it.

📖 Hannah (2009); Barton (1994)

The Hermetic Cosmos & Planetary Correspondences

Now we enter the Hermetic era, where things get even more symbolic, and the planets stop being just celestial objects and start becoming moral allegories with opinions.

Hermeticism, born in Roman Egypt, is what happens when Egyptian metaphysics and Greek philosophy get stuck in a room together and start drafting a collaborative universe fanfic. ...Id absolutely read that.

The result? The Corpus Hermeticum. A collection of magical-philosophical texts that describe the cosmos as:

Alive

Tiered like a metaphysical layer cake

Made entirely of planetary forces that double as emotional archetypes

Each planet = a moral vibe. Each sphere = a psychological ecosystem. It’s less “solar system” and more “spiritual mood board.”

Another little note: ⚠️ Hermeticism ≠ ancient Egyptian religion. ⚠️ It’s a colonial remix. Created in a cultural contact zone where everyone was swapping gods, cosmologies, and intellectual footnotes like they were Pokémon cards.

It’s weird. It’s syncretic theology with a Neoplatonist filter and a flair for cosmic drama.

📖 Copenhaver, Hermetica (1992); Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes (1993)

The Picatrix and the Re-Enchantment of Time

Behold: the Picatrix (Ghayat al-Hakim, if you’re fancy or historically accurate) a 10th-century magical encyclopedia written in Islamic Spain that basically said:

“If you're not timing your spellcasting with planetary math, are you even trying?”

This thing isn like the boss-level ritual timing. It doesn’t care if Mercury is in retrograde, you still have to do the math.

No shortcuts.

No vibes-only spellcraft.

Plan your ritual or perish.

The Picatrix is built on deep Islamic philosophical roots, cosmology, metaphysics, logic, the whole sacred architecture. But when it got translated into Latin during the Renaissance?

All that got whitewashed.

Suddenly, your favorite Renaissance magician is a genius… …but actually just plagiarizing a Muslim scholar and slapping a Latin name on it.

(If you’ve ever read Agrippa and thought “this man definitely did not cite his sources,” you’re not wrong.)

In the worldview of the Picatrix, time isn’t a measurement. Time is a living force. Something you negotiate with. Like a moody deity. Or a cat. Or your landlord.

📖 Pingree (1986); Greer & Warnock (2010)

The Heptameron and Planetary Bureaucracy

The 13th‑century Heptameron turned planetary hours into a literal clerical schedule. Each hour had an angel, an incense, a prayer, a specific filing deadline for your spiritual paperwork.

It’s magic as administration, a holy Excel spreadsheet.

📖 Peterson, The Heptameron of Peter de Abano;  Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy

Ficino, Neoplatonism, and Planetary Music 

Let’s talk about Marsilio Ficino: Renaissance philosopher, priest, Platonist, astrologer, and full-time ✨vibe curator.✨

Ficino believed the planets sang. Not metaphorically. Not symbolically. Literally.

According to him, each planetary hour had its own musical mode. A kind of cosmic playlist for the soul.

Feeling Saturnian and melancholic? Don’t spiral, chant in the right mode and realign your soul’s playlist.

Venus out of sync? Time to vibe with some harmonic resonance and maybe buy another lute.

Mars got you too hyped? Play something gentle before you start a duel.

In Ficino’s world, the universe wasn’t just moving, it was humming. And your job as a human was to tune yourself to that celestial harmony like some kind of enchanted Bluetooth speaker.

"The heavens sing in silence, and we echo them through ritual. " (Yes, that’s real. Yes, it’s gorgeous. Yes, I cried.)

This is astrology meets music theory meets spiritual therapy.

📖 Kaske & Clark, Three Books on Life; Voss, “Ficino and the Magic of Music” (2003)

A System Made Up, But Still Breathing 

Yes, planetary hours are stitched together from empire, priesthood, and poetic nonsense. But they can work.  Not because they’re scientifically valid, because they create rhythm, and rhythm breeds meaning. 

You don’t have to “believe” in planetary hours.  But if you light a candle at dawn, whisper a planet’s name, and feel the air shift, don’t be surprised if time starts whispering back.

This system may be made up, but so are calendars, clocks, and Mondays, and we still let those run our lives.

Sources & Further Reading

Primary Texts

The Picatrix (Pingree trans.; Greer & Warnock ed.)

The Heptameron, ed. Joseph H. Peterson

Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Book II

Corpus Hermeticum, trans. Copenhaver

Secondary Sources

Rochberg, The Heavenly Writing (2004)

Barton, Ancient Astrology (1994)

Hannah, Time in Antiquity (2009)

Campion, A History of Western Astrology Vol I (2008)

Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes (1993)

Warnock, Secrets of Planetary Magic (2004)

Kaske & Clark, Three Books on Life

Voss Angela. “Ficino and the Magic of Music.”Renaissance Studies (2003)

Houlding, Deborah. “Planetary Hours.” Skyscript.co.uk

[elminx]

This is your reminder that the new moon isn’t until after 11pm EDT tonight which means that for any American that doesn’t live in the Eastern time zone , it’s not until the early hours of tomorrow morning.

That means today is the dark of the moon, not really new moon energy. It’s fine if you don’t make a distinction between those two magically but if you set new intentions with the new moon, tomorrow is the better day to do it.

The most common consensus in planetary magic is that new moon magic is best done at the exactitude of solar-lunar conjunction and for the first six hours after.

[scryhard]

Planetary Hours Are A Scam, Part II: Why I Use Them Anyway

(If you thought Part I was long... congratulations, I get worse)

So we know the system is a bit ridiculous.

in Part I we talked about unequal hours that shift with the season. A planetary sequence passed down like a game of cosmic telephone: Babylon to Alexandria to medieval Europe to your phone, which now pings you about the Hour of Jupiter while you’re mid-dentist.

It’s messy. It’s held together by vibes and bureaucracy. It does not care about your Google Calendar.

And yet. I still use planetary hours.

Not because I think they’re true, but because something happens when I treat time like it has a flavor. When I light a candle on Thursday at sunrise because it’s Jupiter hour. When I feel weirdly combative on a Tuesday at 3pm and remember: oh. That’s Mars.

This isn’t about obedience or belief. It’s about attention. Planetary hours are not truth. They’re a rhythm, a little myth you can move inside.

Part II isn’t a defense of planetary hours. It’s more like a field guide. For witches with academic burnout, digital calendars, and a spiritual craving for pattern. For anyone who looks at the sky and asks, “What’s the vibe today?”

You don’t have to believe in planetary hours. You just have to notice what happens when you practice as if they matter.

And yes, there will be a Part III. Don't worry, it’s basically a reference sheet for when you want cosmic organization without the existential dread.

Section 1: How to Use It (When You Can Actually Be Bothered)

(aka: Planetary Hours for the Chronically Ambivalent Witch)

Lets be real, the system is kind of a mess.

Each day is divided into 12 "day" hours and 12 "night" hours, but since the sun and moon are allergic to clocks, those hours change every single day. A "Mars hour" might be 47 minutes long one day and 63 the next. It's a temporal funhouse.

Originally used by ancient priest-astronomers with staff and scrolls. Now reduced to astrology apps telling you it's Moon hour while you're in the Taco Bell drive-thru.

And still.

Some part of you knows when it’s Tuesday morning, the Moon is in Aries, and your blood feels like static. That’s Mars. Not because the timing makes the magic work, but because the timing makes you show up.

Planetary hours don’t owe you power. They offer presence. A mood. A myth. A moment.

This isn’t a spellmaxxing guide. This is “what if time had a personality and you made tea for it” energy.

1. Spell Timing: The “Proper Hour” and the Half‑Truth of Precision

Planetary hours run on sympathetic magic. “Like calls to like.” A Venus spell in a Venus hour on a Friday = a nice resonant ping in the universe.

But life is messy.

You won’t always be able to do your money spell during a waxing Jupiter hour while your chart is flawless and the vibes immaculate. Sometimes your only shot is Wednesday morning before work, with a burnt cinnamon stick and a half-slept brain. That’s still magic.

Here’s your vibe chart:

☉ Sun – Confidence, public power, visibility. For ego, health, solar deities, “look at me” spells.

☽ Moon – Feeling, dreaming, spiraling. For divination, intuition, water magic, emotional messes.

☿ Mercury – Language, tech, trickery. For writing, contracts, movement, sarcasm spells.

♀ Venus – Pleasure, attraction, glam. For love, beauty, art, thirst-traps, blessings.

♂ Mars – Conflict, will, burn. For banishing, protection, strength, or energetic obliteration.

♃ Jupiter – Luck, expansion, big boss energy. For abundance, growth, education, uncursing.

♄ Saturn – Boundaries, silence, endings. For banishment, cursing, shadow work, ancestor calls.

You don’t need perfect alignment. You just need to notice.

“Timing a spell is to bring the practitioner into the right mindset, to make the magician show up at the altar with intention.” — Warnock, 2004

That’s it. That’s the spell. You showed up.

2. Ritual for the Tired, Neurospicy, and Overbooked

Planetary hours are great for people who:

Want structure but hate schedules

Forget what day it is but remember it’s Moon hour

Thrive on low-effort chaos rituals

Some examples for when your soul is 90% static and 10% incense:

Mercury hour – Light a tealight. Write one line. Send the cursed email.

Mars hour – Trim your nails. Shout a word that feels like armor. Burn a sigil on a receipt.

Saturn hour – Fold laundry while contemplating death. Recycle something. Say no to something draining.

You’re not here to perform. You’re here to notice.

“You don’t have to be perfect when you work with the hour; you just have to be present and bear witness to it.” — Danica Boyce, Fair Folk Podcast, 2023

3. When You Actually Want Precision (Electional Moments)

Sometimes you do want to line everything up. That’s when planetary hours hit different:

Talismans – As the Picatrix says: this is architecture. You want the planetary hour, the right day, and a friendly sky.

Ceremonial stuff – Opening ritual space in a relevant hour adds tone. Especially if you like drama.

Long-term spells – Doing a charm every Thursday at Jupiter hour builds resonance. Time becomes your spell circle.

Even basic stuff like sweeping your floor in a Saturn hour can hum with extra weight. You’re stirring time into the act like it’s cloves and rage.

4. The Problem With More Volatile Planets (And Why It’s Also a Gift)

times like Mars hour, are knives. You don’t use it casually. You honor it.

Use a Mars hour for:

Banishing habits in your body

Fire spells

Warding

Talking to warrior ancestors

Avoid Mars hour for:

Hexes while angry

Surgery

“Just vibing” if you're already feral

“Mars hour doesn’t judge your rage. But it will amplify it. Proceed with poetry or armor.” — Agrippa, Book II, ch. 38 (paraphrased)

5. The Ritual Philosophy: It’s Not Science. It’s Spell Tuning.

You’re not casting “because Mars is active.” You’re casting in a Mars hour because you want to feel like Mars is with you.

You’re not invoking the planet. You’re invoking a story about the hour. You’re walking into that hour like it’s a mood-lit room and saying: okay, what flavor of time is this?

Section 2: This System Is Fake (And That’s the Point)

Planetary hours are fake. Not fake like nonsense. Fake like theater, poetry, drag, myth, metaphor. Constructed time. Designed rhythm. Artificial sacredness that works because you treat it like it’s real.

1. Chronos vs. Kairos: You’re Not Late, You’re Mythically Early

Chronos: industrial time. Clocks. Deadlines. Schedules. Capitalism. Kairos: sacred time. The ripening moment. The perfect now.

Planetary hours give you Kairos inside Chronos. They say: this hour is different. Even if you’re in line at Walgreens.

2. Repetition Over Belief

Ritual doesn’t need belief. It needs repetition. You do the thing. Meaning catches up later.

Light a candle at the same hour every day and your brain, body, and spirit start to recognize the shape of meaning.

“Ritual doesn’t believe, it repeats. Belief follows.” — after Catherine Bell

3. The Placebo Is the Point

Magic works like placebo: not because it’s “false,” but because the symbol lands in your nervous system.

The planetary hour is a cue. Your body responds. Your brain fires in rhythm. Your will sharpens.

“Healing by symbol is not illusion. It’s biology performing ritual.” — Daniel Moerman, 1996

4. Sympathetic Magic, Baby

This is just Frazer’s Law of Similarity in motion. “Like affects like.” Mars hour mirrors Mars energy. You’re not casting in time — you’re becoming time.

You are not casting a spell at the right time. You are becoming time.

5. Neuroscience, Quantum Weirdness, and Enchanted Attention

Magic isn’t “outside” logic. It’s just weird logic.

Focused attention activates deep brain patterns

Rhythmic practice entrains hormones

Predictive coding shapes experience

Your ritual becomes a feedback loop. Not because Mars is watching, but because your body believes it’s Mars hour — and that makes it real.

Section 3: Planetary Hours as Emotional Weather

These aren’t hours. They’re moods.

Mars hour feels like grinding your teeth. Venus hour softens your jaw. Saturn hour pulls the sky a little lower.

Planetary hours don’t tick. They arrive.

1. The Planets Are Not Symbols. They’re Weather.

Venus hour is perfume in the hallway. Mars hour is an open flame in your ribs. Saturn hour is a grandmother ghost with a mortgage and a mission.

You’re not “working with time.” You’re asking time what it wants.

2. Time as a Spirit: Welcome to Animism

Planetary hours as spirits, not schedules.

In Indigenous and animist cosmologies—many of which actively reject the colonial impulse to split time from land, spirit, or body—hours aren’t empty. They’re inhabited. You don’t use an hour. You encounter it. Time isn’t a spreadsheet. Time is a haunted Airbnb with weird vibes and no checkout policy.

A planetary hour isn’t a slot in your planner. It’s a guest that shows up uninvited and insists on rearranging your mood.

Venus hour is a perfumed guest who spends 40 minutes adjusting your mirror and says “love is a spell, actually” before vanishing in a cloud of rosewater.

Mercury hour is a bisexual raccoon in a hoodie on roller skates, talking too fast, handing you three ideas and a bad decision.

Saturn hour is a veiled grandmother ghost who shows up with a ledger, tells you it’s time to pay your debts, and leaves a single black stone on your pillow.

These hours aren’t units. They’re entities. They don’t tick by. They pass through. You don’t manage them. You host them. Whether you were ready or not.

Ask:

“Who just entered the room?”

“What does this hour want from me?”

“What offering does this feeling deserve?”

Sources: David Abram, Graham Harvey

3. Your Body Already Knows the Hour

Mars hour = your chest tightens. Venus hour = your tongue loosens. Saturn hour = your joints remember every mistake you’ve ever made.

Turn that into practice:

Taste mapping

Movement gestures

Color journaling

Breath rituals

Somatic hour tracking

You're not logging time. You're living inside it.

4. Daily Mood Magic

Sometimes the spell isn’t what you do. It’s how you do it.

Moon hour: cry on purpose

Jupiter hour: give something away

Saturn hour: shut up

Venus hour: flirt with a plant

5. Pattern = Relationship

Track the same hour every day for a month. Notice what it does to your bones. That’s the real planetary magic. Patterned intimacy.

You’re not asking, “What should I do?” You’re asking, “What is this hour making me?”

Section 4: A Soft Conclusion

(why I Still Use a Scam System)

They’re a patchwork cosmology made of Babylonian omens, Hellenistic math, medieval angel spreadsheets, Renaissance vibes, and astrology apps trying to upsell you on enchanted hydration.

They contradict themselves. They weren’t revealed—they were invented, rewritten, mistranslated, remixed by people who probably couldn’t agree on lunch.

And I use them anyway.

Not because they’re true, but because they give me a way to live in time that feels like something other than surviving the clock. In a world that compresses time into deliverables and digital burnout, planetary hours let me say:

“This hour is different. This hour is sacred, because I said so.”

That’s not delusion. That’s ritual.

1. The System is Fake. The Ritual is Real.

This isn’t divine law. It’s sacred collage:

Babylonian skywatchers tracking omens

Greek philosophers giving planets moral alignments

Islamic scholars building electional frameworks

Renaissance magicians syncing planets to music and fluids (??)

None of it was unified. It was never a singular truth. It was always a ritual remix.

And yet... When I light a candle during Venus hour with rose oil on my wrist and a folded love note in my pocket, something shifts.

Maybe it’s Venus. Maybe it’s memory. Maybe it’s just me, treating time like it matters.

You make something up. You do it on purpose. And meaning shows up like it was waiting for you.

2. The Point Is That It’s Arbitrary

Planetary hours aren’t sacred law. They’re poetic time-stamps. Names we give to hours so we can interact with them.

They work because they’re arbitrary. Because they ask you to treat time like a story.

You're not submitting to them. You're flirting.

You light a candle in Saturn hour not out of fear, but to sit beside gravity and say, “I see you.” It’s not about obedience. It’s about relationship. The kind you build with ghosts, or weather, or weird old furniture that hums when you touch it.

You can’t obey planetary hours like law. You romance them like a ghost.

3. I Don’t Believe in It. I Practice It.

I don’t think Mars cares what I’m doing at 3:17pm. I don’t think Venus is grading my glamour spells.

But I still practice. Because belief isn’t required. Attention is.

Planetary hours are like myths:

Not facts, but mirrors. Not dogma, but mood lighting for the soul.

When I use them, I move slower. I listen more. Time stops being a spreadsheet and starts being a conversation.

And I become the kind of person who says: “I don’t know if this will work. But I want to do it like this.”

And that wanting? That’s the spell.

4. What It Gives Me: Structure Without Stricture

I don’t use planetary hours because they’re necessary. I use them because they change the shape of my day.

They offer:

A rhythm to move with

Gentle structure instead of pressure

A moment to pause and wonder, “What time is it really?”

A reason to treat time like a guest, not a taskmaster

When you start thinking this way, time stops feeling like a treadmill.

It becomes a visitation.

Sometimes you greet the hour. Sometimes you miss it. And it passes like a deer in the brush. No judgment, just motion.

No punishment. No divine audit. Just rhythm. Just presence. Just time with teeth.

5. Why I Still Use a Scam System

Because I’m not here for cosmic certainty. I’m here for the relationship.

All magical systems are ways of talking back to the world. They give us language. They give us rhythm. They give us reasons to stop scrolling and light a damn candle.

Planetary hours don’t demand belief. They ask for noticing. And that noticing?

It feels like prayer.

Sources & Further Reading

Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy

Angela Voss, “The Aesthetic Approach to Esoteric Wisdom”

Alice Sparkly Kat, Postcolonial Astrology

Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice

Christopher Warnock, Secrets of Planetary Magic

Daniel Moerman, “Meaning, Medicine, and the ‘Placebo Effect’”

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble

Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds

Francesca Rochberg, The Heavenly Writing

Graham Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living World

Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place

James Frazer, The Golden Bough

John Michael Greer, The Art and Practice of Geomancy

Liz Greene, The Astrology of Fate

Normandi Ellis, Invoking the Scribes of Ancient Egypt

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative

Picatrix, Book II

Stanley Tambiah, “A Performative Approach to Ritual”

Tillich, Theology of Culture

Danica Boyce, “Time and the Witch” (Fair Folk Podcast)

[graycloak]

Planetary Timing

Days are easy enough to remember. Hours are a little more complex, only because the term “hour” is honorary - it is an amount of time that is variable, depending on the current sunrise/sunset times where you are. I use a program on my PC for this, if I’m being completely honest  :P hehe.. [ChronosXP]. I love it, and highly recommend it.

Book 1, Chapter 2 of The Key of Solomon, titled, “Of the Days, and Hours, and of the Virtues of the Planets,” gives the fundamentals of magickal timing, as well as going into some basic correspondences for the planets and movements of the moon. Even if you have no interest in Solomonic Magick in general, this chapter makes for an interesting read even if only to see how far back these staples of magickal timing go :)

I caution you, however: In his (very popular) edition of the Key, S. Liddell MacGregor Mathers inserted an unfortunate “Note by Editor” which attempts to simplify the language used in the text, but ends up giving instructions completely contrary to the text. If you have decided to follow the traditional method for calculating planetary hours, you should ignore the Mathers Note.

Planetary Days

From [Book 1, Chapter 2 of The Key of Solomon]:

It must, therefore, be understood that the planets have their dominion over the day which approacheth nearest unto the name which is given and attributed unto them -- viz., over Saturday, Saturn; Thursday, Jupiter; Tuesday, Mars; Sunday, the Sun; Friday, Venus; Wednesday, Mercury; and Monday, the Moon.

Which gives us:

Sunday - Sun

Monday - Moon

Tuesday - Mars

Wednesday - Mercury

Thursday - Jupiter

Friday - Venus

Saturday - Saturn

Planetary Hours

From [Book 1, Chapter 2 of The Key of Solomon]:

The rule of the planets over each hour begins from the dawn at the rising of the Sun on the day which take its name from such planet, and the planet which follows it in order, succeeds to the rule over the next hour. Thus (on Saturday) Saturn rules the first hour, Jupiter the second, Mars the third, the Sun the fourth, Venus the fifth, Mercury the sixth, the Moon the seventh, and Saturn returns in the rule over the eighth, and the others in their turn, the planets always keeping the same relative order.

This is a little more abstract, if you don’t have an example to work from. I’ll use the same example I used in [a previous post on the subject]:

Planetary Hours are calculated by finding your local sunrise and sunset times, taking the inclusive time between, and dividing it equally into 12 units. This becomes the number of minutes for each “hour” of the day. Then you do the same for the inclusive time between sunset and sunrise of the next day in order to determine your “hours” of the night.

For example: Let’s say the sun is rising at 7AM and setting at 5PM. This means your day (the time between sunrise and sunset) is made up of 10 hours (600 minutes), and your night (the time between sunset and sunrise of the next day) is 14 hours (840 minutes).

Day Hours = 600 minutes ÷ 12 = 50-minute segments

Night Hours = 840 minutes  ÷ 12 = 70-minute segments

Planetary hour rulership starts on the first hour of the day with the ruler of that day, then goes through the planets in order. This resyncs at the first hour of the night.

It is worth noting, Abramelin [didn’t like this system very much] and concluded Planetary Days should be when the given planet is visible for you above the horizon, and Planetary Hours should be when the given planet is in the Meridian of your location.

There’s nothing to say you can’t do both though ;)  I tend to follow Jason Miller’s [lead] and use Solomonic timing as a default, adding or swapping Abramelin timing to add personal emphasis to something very important.

I put together a handy chart for quick reference. The hours are color coded, using the colors of the planets, and I used the same example as above and in [my other post]. 

(for a larger version of the above chart, click [here])