#ancient timekeeping

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)