Sign Sagittarius, eleven degrees
Phase Waxing crescent
Condition Peregrine
The word to know today
Planetary hours
Each day and each night was cut into twelve hours, unequal, stretching and shrinking with the season. Every hour was assigned a planet, running in the old order by speed. The system fell out of use centuries ago and left the names of the days of the week behind it.

The Founding Fathers Had A Soundtrack

George Washington heard it.

Benjamin Franklin heard it.

Paul Revere heard it.

For over 300 years, this was locked inside private ceremonies performed by some of the most powerful men in history.

No recording existed.

No outsider had ever witnessed it.

Until one man… a member for twenty years… broke his oath of silence and captured it.

>> Hear what they heard

This isn’t a modern creation.

Nobody "designed" this in a lab.

It comes from a living tradition that predates the founding of America.

The same ceremony.

The same tones.

Passed down through generations behind closed doors.

The man who recorded it says he felt the effects in his bones the first time he heard it. Goosebumps.

Tears.

A sense that something ancient had just woken up inside him.

He’s now sharing it publicly for the first time.

The men who guard this tradition are not pleased.

But he believes it’s too powerful to keep hidden while good people are struggling.

Hear the recording before it’s taken down

P.S. He’s an accountant, not a guru. That’s part of why I trust him.

Today is Wednesday, and the name is a fossil. The Moon crossed into Sagittarius at 01:00 UTC this morning and reaches about eleven degrees of it by tonight, sixteen percent lit. None of that has anything to do with Wednesday. In Latin the day belonged to Mercury, and it still does in every language that took its week from Rome: mercredi, mercoledi, miercoles. English swapped Woden in for Mercury and kept the slot.
The slot comes from the hours. Each day and each night was divided into twelve, and they were not equal to one another. A daylight hour in summer is long and in winter short, because twelve of them have to fill the stretch from sunrise to sunset whatever its length that week. Every hour was then assigned a planet, running slowest first: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon, and round again.
Twenty four hours shared among seven planets leaves a remainder of three, so the planet ruling the first hour of a day moves three places along the list every time the sun comes up. Begin on Saturn’s day with Saturn, and the first hours fall out as Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus. That is the week, in order, and it is the whole reason Monday belongs to the Moon: lundi, lunes, Montag. Nobody reckons by planetary hours now. The names the system produced are still printed on every calendar.
From the shelf
Abu Ma’shar
Ninth century Baghdad, where the division of the day into planetary hours is working arithmetic rather than an antiquity.

Read more from Lunar Almanac

Read all publications