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)