Why not? - January 15, 2010
I've been bragging for years about my theory of hendecady, or how to save the world by switching from a seven-day week to an eleven-day week (don't worry,there's the same number of free days, they're just not every five days). So, without further ado, I'd like to start the serial publishing of my magnum opus righ chere, righ now. Mazeltov! Mabruk!
Thom Moore
HEBDOMADY
The Menorah, the Days of the Week, and the Ills of Society
Many years ago, as a 14-year-old student of French, I drew the fairly obvious conclusion that English and French between them held a curious piece of information, something that my attention had never been drawn to before either by adults, teachers, or anything that I had read: that the days of the week were all named for astronomical objects. Since this is something that has to cross the mind of anyone exposed to at least one Germanic and one Romance language, I won't waste any time on that subject, except to say that it is probably most profitable to compare English and Italian, since 'venerdi' won't suggest marketing and 'giovedi' won't suggest game-playing, as the French words 'vendredi' and 'jeudi' might. One of the additional facts I learned along with this was the definition of the word 'esoteric': it doesn't refer necessarily to things abstruse or concealed from the masses, it merely means something that people can happily ignore, for whatever reason. I never once encountered anyone in authority who could enlighten me in the slightest. Years later, when I was reading an otherwise unremarkable biography of Captain James Cook, I was drawn to the depiction of the adolescent mariner's habit of using astronomical symbols (or 'glyphs', as they should be referred to, reserving the word 'symbol' for the broader meaning of something standing in for a host of related meanings in particular contexts) for the days of the week in his log book, a habit noted with approval by his superior officers but not amplified on by the author.
Figure 1: {see the Photo Gallery for this and all other figures) the classical or Platonic or Ptolemaic system of planetary spheres
It might be germane at this point to stop and get a little more thoroughly acquainted with these seven planets, or gods, or principles, or symbols, or whatever you would like to think of them as. To do this in the proper spirit, you are all going to have to shed whatever residual prejudices you might have against what might be deemed astrology and consider these symbols in their purely classical sense, symbols containing within them not only (1) primary scientific meaning as observable astronomical objects and phenomena and (2) religious meaning to whole millennia of peoples and civilisations, as the sky gods, but oodles of secondary meaning as well, as principles of things like activity, emotion, and sensibility.
Looking at figure one (which represents, by the way, the classical, or Platonic, or Ptolemaic spheres in their perceived order), the first glyph you see above the flat disk of the earth is the easily-recognisable crescent glyph of the moon — . The moon has an exclusively feminine character as a symbol almost everywhere on earth. The coincidence of its apparent size and plane of motion with the sun's is one of the major synchronicities of existence, one that probably gave rise to the faculty of abstract thought itself. It has enormous power to this day as a major symbol of witchcraft, along with other symbolic values, such as its representing motherhood in all forms from the physical to the abstract, the more modern psychological qualities of the unconscious, instinctive feelings and behaviour, and emotions and emotionality. As a god with a name, this would of course be Diana, in Latin. This symbol was used by the young James Cook to signify Monday in his personal log book.
Mercury ( — a small circle with a cross at the bottom and horns or possibly a crescent moon on top of it) comes next in the spheres, moving upwards away from the sublunary world, and he is in many ways one of the least-talked about of these Classical sky gods, not being associated with the gangbuster themes of sex, violence, or obscene wealth, but his icon survives everywhere, from the logo for Western Union to the statue outside the International Congress building in Moscow. Mercury's symbolic significance is as the god not only of communications and commerce, but thievery as well as more modern psychological things like thought and mentation. As an iconic principle of the kind to be considered here, it is also a sexually ambivalent symbol for undifferentiated youth (hence its use as the medical symbol for a natal hermaphrodite), and even absolute Incipience. This symbol was Wednesday for James Cook.
Venus (a circle with a downward hanging cross — ) equates to a force that attracts, an energy analogous to the physical principle of gravity and its inexorable pull. This calling force tends to make unity out of diversity (i.e., one beast with two backs). Negative attributes are never mentioned in astrological or other discussions of Venus-as-principle, but a reflective person would have to admit that this is the principle behind the summons of predators to crying infant creatures in the wild, or flying insects to their more noisome repasts. When it is a symbol among other symbols, it tends to mean an objectified thing, and arguably this is exactly what is meant by a sex object or object of desire; but for James Cook it was just Friday, or sometimes the brightest object in the sky after the sun and moon.
The sun (represented in astronomy and astrology by , a glyph made up of a circle with a central dot) is fourth out of the seven, smack dab in the middle. The fact that it was not the most important planet to the Sumerians says a lot about their powers of observation and abstraction. The sun became by their extension the god Apollo to Hellenic and Roman civilizations – the god of clarity, reason, and consciousness itself, not just the obvious source of light and heat. It can be argued at length (and will be before this is over) that this is the underlying identity of any god worshiped on a Sunday, and that the gods of the other days of the week would similarly inform any holy days of obligation.
Mars (a circle with an upward-pointing arrow, as if to say "sun-up" — ) is admittedly a lot more in mind in modern times than Jupiter since he is so clearly identified with everything from war to unarmed combat to music that you can march to, and since his symbol is used as well to signify the male gender of creatures that have two sexes. But the truth of Martial symbolism can be argued to be the principle of selfhood, of asserting independence from the containing matrix, of refusing to take consensus direction or any restriction on individual desire. It also can be said to share with the sun some of the symbolism of energy itself, in this case as some kind of enabling force. It was Cook's Tuesday symbol.
Jupiter (an inverted, rotated version of the Saturn glyph — ) can be viewed as a non-survivor into modern folklore, known only to people educated in Graeco-Roman mythology, widely disparaged at the present time as the superseded randy buffoon-king in a discredited theology, the Olympian state religion of Rome. His function to the Sumerians and Babylonians was as the god of thunder and rain in a place where both are entirely welcome, the god of increase and good auspice. His iconic status as the "son" of Saturn, whom Jupiter replaced as Father God in Graeco-Roman myth after emasculating him with the same sickle that Saturn had used on his own father, Uranus, can be considered a simple iconotropic lie used to justify his supersession of Saturn's authority in the various Olympic-style religions, where a lot of (non-celestial) local gods and goddesses had to be rationalized into one coherent state religion for political reasons, with a virile and heroic paterfamilias in place of a dour and aged one. I personally am amused and curious about his metamorphosis in modern times in animated cartoons and cartoonish film-series into an ever-increasingly gray-bearded figure, a clear recrudescence of Saturn as "Father God." But the Jupiter that we are dealing with is simply a symbol of life at ease, riches and generosity, growth and increase, expansiveness and good humour, and James Cook's Thursday.
Last of all but the most important, Saturn ( — a billhook or grain-sickle with a crosspiece on the haft), at the top of the stack, is the most confusingly varied in his surviving images. Durability being one of the qualities of Saturn as a principle, it is not surprising that he turns up towards the end of the year (his saturnalia festival) either as jolly Santa Claus or as (the respectively and successively more forbidding) Father Christmas, Grandfather Frost, or Father Time in the New Year's cartoons, scythe over his bony shoulder. His symbolic qualities all have to do with his function as a terminator and general nay-sayer: all hardness, all discipline, all fixedness, all limitation, all bad luck, all rules, all structure, all collective endeavour with its restrictions on individuality, the very essence of Reality itself, are aspects of his symbolism. His most enduring survival is of course as God the Father, Yahweh, the Old Testament creator of the universe. It can be asserted that the week itself is an artifact that was created to glorify and venerate this god, and continues to do so, long after most people on Earth have lost any conscious connection between him and his week. James Cook, long before he became a captain or famous, used this symbol in his log for Saturday.
Anyway, many years after my not-very-original insight into the identity of the days of the week with the seven pagan celestial gods, it spontaneously occurred to me to wonder why these seven astronomical symbols are ordered in the week the way they are. Idle speculation, indeed. Then I encountered something truly curious. In several pre-1974 editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the problem is neatly resolved in an article by an unnamed classicist. Since that year, though, the relevant articles have been written by "experts" without any apparent understanding of it. It is no longer possible now for any curious person to find out what the week is about except from an out-of-date edition (up to and including the 14th) of the Britannica.
This pre-1974 article explained how Sumerian knowledge and beliefs were based on inductive reasoning after untold years of observation and correlation of the cycles of the sky with the cycles of the seasons and mundane events: the seven moving celestial objects – the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn – moving against the background of the fixed stars, their different cycles more or less obvious and meaningful in their various ways.
The heavenly spheres: The Sumerians and their successors (everyone from Europe to India, until Copernicus) believed the earth to be surrounded by a succession of heavenly spheres, each containing one of the "planets" (the original Greek meaning of which—"wanderer [through the skies]"—included the sun and moon) and arranged in a particular order above and around us. The nearest and most concerned with everyday life was the sphere of the moon, containing the earth and its denizens—the 'sublunary' world. The moon was perceived to be the god most directly concerned with human existence, joined as it is to things like tides and various aspects of femininity. Enclosing it, and therefore controlling it and us as well, was the sphere of Mercury. Around that was the sphere of Venus, and around that was the sphere of the sun. Outside that came the spheres respectively of Mars and Jupiter, and then, last and most important from the point of view of rulership, the sphere of the Time Lord himself, the patriarch god, Saturn. Beyond his sphere was "Seventh Heaven", the timeless realm of the fixed stars and constellations, where life was presumed to be free from the caprice and machinations of the planetary gods.
The author of the Britannica article professed, as a Classics scholar, not to understand why they were ordered in this fashion. Any astronomer, astrologer, stargazer, or navigator could have told him: this ordering of the spheres has to do with the apparent relative speed of the bodies around the zodiac, from Saturn, the slowest, with an average period of 29 and a half years to complete the circuit of the sky, to the moon, the fastest, with an average period of 29 and a half days. This absolute correlation of the two extreme planets with the two kinds of sun-cycle must have been one of the most electrifying discoveries of all time, regardless of however inexact the periods are to modern science.
Where the week comes from: 7 and 12, the holy numbers. The reason for the number seven's appearance in folklore and occult philosophy as a lucky or mystical number presumably lies in its being the prime celestial number, the first mathematical sum that you get when you observe the sky. The second such number is the number twelve, which is the number of lunar cycles in an average year (sun-cycle). This number was apparently used by analogy to break up the day (also a sun-cycle) into manageable pieces, for whatever reason.
The week, according the to Britannica article, was invented by the Sumerians, who came up first with this division of the solar cycle of the "day" into twelve pieces by analogy with the solar cycle of the year and its twelve-piece sectioning by the lunar cycles; they also decided to do the same to the roughly equivalent period of the sun's absence (the "night"). They dedicated the "first" day of their reckoning and its first hour to the most important god, Saturn, and then gave succeeding hours of that first-ever day to the rest of the planetary gods in decreasing order of importance. Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the sun, Venus, Mercury, and the moon are repeatedly divided in turn into the 24 hours of the day (or rather into the 12 hours of the day and the 12 hours of the night), so that the 1st, 8th, 15th, and 22nd hours "belong" to Saturn (along with the day that the first hour begins) finishing the cycle with hour 23 belonging to Jupiter again, hour 24 belonging to Mars again, and the following first hour of the next day belonging to the Sun. When this pattern is repeated in order (=meaning the second time you begin the sequence with the sun, then the moon at the end of that sequence, etc.), the days of the week follow each other ad infinitum. The most ancient existing religious system that we know a good deal about—and which springs directly from Abraham, who came from Sumerian city of Ur of the Chaldees!—is Judaism, for whose practitioners the most holy moment of the most holy hour of the most holy day of the week is the moment of sunset on Friday—the first hour of Saturday, even in our system until recently. I would remind you all that the 'eve' of something didn't used to mean 'the day before' but 'the evening of'—which is why some people insist on their right to open their presents after sundown on Christmas Eve.
The week derived this way, the 'astral' week, as it's called, affects everything in the modern world having to do with day-to-day existence (the sum total of which happens to be our ancient religious, work, and recreation patterns—all tied to the week, and the ubiquitous 12-hour clock with its inexorable semaphore). All other civilizations in the Old World have at some time adopted the seven-day week and its astronomical baggage: not just our linearly Sumerian-derived Western civilization, but also the great Asian civilizations of India and China and all their satellite cultures as well.
Needless to say, I was delighted to be thus enlightened, and dismayed when I found that this information isn't readily available to anyone curious about it. I was particularly dismayed by the mind-set of the authors of the post-1974 Micropaedia articles on the week, none of whom have any apparent notion of its derivation, but who are fully capable of going on at length about the psychological necessity for humans to have regular relaxation.
Thom Moore
HEBDOMADY
The Menorah, the Days of the Week, and the Ills of Society
Many years ago, as a 14-year-old student of French, I drew the fairly obvious conclusion that English and French between them held a curious piece of information, something that my attention had never been drawn to before either by adults, teachers, or anything that I had read: that the days of the week were all named for astronomical objects. Since this is something that has to cross the mind of anyone exposed to at least one Germanic and one Romance language, I won't waste any time on that subject, except to say that it is probably most profitable to compare English and Italian, since 'venerdi' won't suggest marketing and 'giovedi' won't suggest game-playing, as the French words 'vendredi' and 'jeudi' might. One of the additional facts I learned along with this was the definition of the word 'esoteric': it doesn't refer necessarily to things abstruse or concealed from the masses, it merely means something that people can happily ignore, for whatever reason. I never once encountered anyone in authority who could enlighten me in the slightest. Years later, when I was reading an otherwise unremarkable biography of Captain James Cook, I was drawn to the depiction of the adolescent mariner's habit of using astronomical symbols (or 'glyphs', as they should be referred to, reserving the word 'symbol' for the broader meaning of something standing in for a host of related meanings in particular contexts) for the days of the week in his log book, a habit noted with approval by his superior officers but not amplified on by the author.
Figure 1: {see the Photo Gallery for this and all other figures) the classical or Platonic or Ptolemaic system of planetary spheres
It might be germane at this point to stop and get a little more thoroughly acquainted with these seven planets, or gods, or principles, or symbols, or whatever you would like to think of them as. To do this in the proper spirit, you are all going to have to shed whatever residual prejudices you might have against what might be deemed astrology and consider these symbols in their purely classical sense, symbols containing within them not only (1) primary scientific meaning as observable astronomical objects and phenomena and (2) religious meaning to whole millennia of peoples and civilisations, as the sky gods, but oodles of secondary meaning as well, as principles of things like activity, emotion, and sensibility.
Looking at figure one (which represents, by the way, the classical, or Platonic, or Ptolemaic spheres in their perceived order), the first glyph you see above the flat disk of the earth is the easily-recognisable crescent glyph of the moon — . The moon has an exclusively feminine character as a symbol almost everywhere on earth. The coincidence of its apparent size and plane of motion with the sun's is one of the major synchronicities of existence, one that probably gave rise to the faculty of abstract thought itself. It has enormous power to this day as a major symbol of witchcraft, along with other symbolic values, such as its representing motherhood in all forms from the physical to the abstract, the more modern psychological qualities of the unconscious, instinctive feelings and behaviour, and emotions and emotionality. As a god with a name, this would of course be Diana, in Latin. This symbol was used by the young James Cook to signify Monday in his personal log book.
Mercury ( — a small circle with a cross at the bottom and horns or possibly a crescent moon on top of it) comes next in the spheres, moving upwards away from the sublunary world, and he is in many ways one of the least-talked about of these Classical sky gods, not being associated with the gangbuster themes of sex, violence, or obscene wealth, but his icon survives everywhere, from the logo for Western Union to the statue outside the International Congress building in Moscow. Mercury's symbolic significance is as the god not only of communications and commerce, but thievery as well as more modern psychological things like thought and mentation. As an iconic principle of the kind to be considered here, it is also a sexually ambivalent symbol for undifferentiated youth (hence its use as the medical symbol for a natal hermaphrodite), and even absolute Incipience. This symbol was Wednesday for James Cook.
Venus (a circle with a downward hanging cross — ) equates to a force that attracts, an energy analogous to the physical principle of gravity and its inexorable pull. This calling force tends to make unity out of diversity (i.e., one beast with two backs). Negative attributes are never mentioned in astrological or other discussions of Venus-as-principle, but a reflective person would have to admit that this is the principle behind the summons of predators to crying infant creatures in the wild, or flying insects to their more noisome repasts. When it is a symbol among other symbols, it tends to mean an objectified thing, and arguably this is exactly what is meant by a sex object or object of desire; but for James Cook it was just Friday, or sometimes the brightest object in the sky after the sun and moon.
The sun (represented in astronomy and astrology by , a glyph made up of a circle with a central dot) is fourth out of the seven, smack dab in the middle. The fact that it was not the most important planet to the Sumerians says a lot about their powers of observation and abstraction. The sun became by their extension the god Apollo to Hellenic and Roman civilizations – the god of clarity, reason, and consciousness itself, not just the obvious source of light and heat. It can be argued at length (and will be before this is over) that this is the underlying identity of any god worshiped on a Sunday, and that the gods of the other days of the week would similarly inform any holy days of obligation.
Mars (a circle with an upward-pointing arrow, as if to say "sun-up" — ) is admittedly a lot more in mind in modern times than Jupiter since he is so clearly identified with everything from war to unarmed combat to music that you can march to, and since his symbol is used as well to signify the male gender of creatures that have two sexes. But the truth of Martial symbolism can be argued to be the principle of selfhood, of asserting independence from the containing matrix, of refusing to take consensus direction or any restriction on individual desire. It also can be said to share with the sun some of the symbolism of energy itself, in this case as some kind of enabling force. It was Cook's Tuesday symbol.
Jupiter (an inverted, rotated version of the Saturn glyph — ) can be viewed as a non-survivor into modern folklore, known only to people educated in Graeco-Roman mythology, widely disparaged at the present time as the superseded randy buffoon-king in a discredited theology, the Olympian state religion of Rome. His function to the Sumerians and Babylonians was as the god of thunder and rain in a place where both are entirely welcome, the god of increase and good auspice. His iconic status as the "son" of Saturn, whom Jupiter replaced as Father God in Graeco-Roman myth after emasculating him with the same sickle that Saturn had used on his own father, Uranus, can be considered a simple iconotropic lie used to justify his supersession of Saturn's authority in the various Olympic-style religions, where a lot of (non-celestial) local gods and goddesses had to be rationalized into one coherent state religion for political reasons, with a virile and heroic paterfamilias in place of a dour and aged one. I personally am amused and curious about his metamorphosis in modern times in animated cartoons and cartoonish film-series into an ever-increasingly gray-bearded figure, a clear recrudescence of Saturn as "Father God." But the Jupiter that we are dealing with is simply a symbol of life at ease, riches and generosity, growth and increase, expansiveness and good humour, and James Cook's Thursday.
Last of all but the most important, Saturn ( — a billhook or grain-sickle with a crosspiece on the haft), at the top of the stack, is the most confusingly varied in his surviving images. Durability being one of the qualities of Saturn as a principle, it is not surprising that he turns up towards the end of the year (his saturnalia festival) either as jolly Santa Claus or as (the respectively and successively more forbidding) Father Christmas, Grandfather Frost, or Father Time in the New Year's cartoons, scythe over his bony shoulder. His symbolic qualities all have to do with his function as a terminator and general nay-sayer: all hardness, all discipline, all fixedness, all limitation, all bad luck, all rules, all structure, all collective endeavour with its restrictions on individuality, the very essence of Reality itself, are aspects of his symbolism. His most enduring survival is of course as God the Father, Yahweh, the Old Testament creator of the universe. It can be asserted that the week itself is an artifact that was created to glorify and venerate this god, and continues to do so, long after most people on Earth have lost any conscious connection between him and his week. James Cook, long before he became a captain or famous, used this symbol in his log for Saturday.
Anyway, many years after my not-very-original insight into the identity of the days of the week with the seven pagan celestial gods, it spontaneously occurred to me to wonder why these seven astronomical symbols are ordered in the week the way they are. Idle speculation, indeed. Then I encountered something truly curious. In several pre-1974 editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the problem is neatly resolved in an article by an unnamed classicist. Since that year, though, the relevant articles have been written by "experts" without any apparent understanding of it. It is no longer possible now for any curious person to find out what the week is about except from an out-of-date edition (up to and including the 14th) of the Britannica.
This pre-1974 article explained how Sumerian knowledge and beliefs were based on inductive reasoning after untold years of observation and correlation of the cycles of the sky with the cycles of the seasons and mundane events: the seven moving celestial objects – the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn – moving against the background of the fixed stars, their different cycles more or less obvious and meaningful in their various ways.
The heavenly spheres: The Sumerians and their successors (everyone from Europe to India, until Copernicus) believed the earth to be surrounded by a succession of heavenly spheres, each containing one of the "planets" (the original Greek meaning of which—"wanderer [through the skies]"—included the sun and moon) and arranged in a particular order above and around us. The nearest and most concerned with everyday life was the sphere of the moon, containing the earth and its denizens—the 'sublunary' world. The moon was perceived to be the god most directly concerned with human existence, joined as it is to things like tides and various aspects of femininity. Enclosing it, and therefore controlling it and us as well, was the sphere of Mercury. Around that was the sphere of Venus, and around that was the sphere of the sun. Outside that came the spheres respectively of Mars and Jupiter, and then, last and most important from the point of view of rulership, the sphere of the Time Lord himself, the patriarch god, Saturn. Beyond his sphere was "Seventh Heaven", the timeless realm of the fixed stars and constellations, where life was presumed to be free from the caprice and machinations of the planetary gods.
The author of the Britannica article professed, as a Classics scholar, not to understand why they were ordered in this fashion. Any astronomer, astrologer, stargazer, or navigator could have told him: this ordering of the spheres has to do with the apparent relative speed of the bodies around the zodiac, from Saturn, the slowest, with an average period of 29 and a half years to complete the circuit of the sky, to the moon, the fastest, with an average period of 29 and a half days. This absolute correlation of the two extreme planets with the two kinds of sun-cycle must have been one of the most electrifying discoveries of all time, regardless of however inexact the periods are to modern science.
Where the week comes from: 7 and 12, the holy numbers. The reason for the number seven's appearance in folklore and occult philosophy as a lucky or mystical number presumably lies in its being the prime celestial number, the first mathematical sum that you get when you observe the sky. The second such number is the number twelve, which is the number of lunar cycles in an average year (sun-cycle). This number was apparently used by analogy to break up the day (also a sun-cycle) into manageable pieces, for whatever reason.
The week, according the to Britannica article, was invented by the Sumerians, who came up first with this division of the solar cycle of the "day" into twelve pieces by analogy with the solar cycle of the year and its twelve-piece sectioning by the lunar cycles; they also decided to do the same to the roughly equivalent period of the sun's absence (the "night"). They dedicated the "first" day of their reckoning and its first hour to the most important god, Saturn, and then gave succeeding hours of that first-ever day to the rest of the planetary gods in decreasing order of importance. Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the sun, Venus, Mercury, and the moon are repeatedly divided in turn into the 24 hours of the day (or rather into the 12 hours of the day and the 12 hours of the night), so that the 1st, 8th, 15th, and 22nd hours "belong" to Saturn (along with the day that the first hour begins) finishing the cycle with hour 23 belonging to Jupiter again, hour 24 belonging to Mars again, and the following first hour of the next day belonging to the Sun. When this pattern is repeated in order (=meaning the second time you begin the sequence with the sun, then the moon at the end of that sequence, etc.), the days of the week follow each other ad infinitum. The most ancient existing religious system that we know a good deal about—and which springs directly from Abraham, who came from Sumerian city of Ur of the Chaldees!—is Judaism, for whose practitioners the most holy moment of the most holy hour of the most holy day of the week is the moment of sunset on Friday—the first hour of Saturday, even in our system until recently. I would remind you all that the 'eve' of something didn't used to mean 'the day before' but 'the evening of'—which is why some people insist on their right to open their presents after sundown on Christmas Eve.
The week derived this way, the 'astral' week, as it's called, affects everything in the modern world having to do with day-to-day existence (the sum total of which happens to be our ancient religious, work, and recreation patterns—all tied to the week, and the ubiquitous 12-hour clock with its inexorable semaphore). All other civilizations in the Old World have at some time adopted the seven-day week and its astronomical baggage: not just our linearly Sumerian-derived Western civilization, but also the great Asian civilizations of India and China and all their satellite cultures as well.
Needless to say, I was delighted to be thus enlightened, and dismayed when I found that this information isn't readily available to anyone curious about it. I was particularly dismayed by the mind-set of the authors of the post-1974 Micropaedia articles on the week, none of whom have any apparent notion of its derivation, but who are fully capable of going on at length about the psychological necessity for humans to have regular relaxation.