Father Sky

As early as 1500 BCE Egyptians were dividing their sundials into 10 parts (hours) plus 2 twilight hours, (one for morning, one for evening). Night was also to be 12 hours… so you have 24 in total.

Why do I share that? Well, as promised last time, I wish to share how we got the order of the 7 days to our week… and having 24 hours is key to that understanding.

The second important piece is understanding this was back when everyone assumed the earth was the center of the universe. So lining up the planets by their distance from the sun as we do today just didn’t matter.

What made more sense was to list the celestial wanderers according to how fast they moved from one constellation of the zodiac to the next… from slowest to fastest. So instead of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn you get; 1) Saturn, 2) Jupiter, 3) Mars, 4) Sun, 5) Venus, 6) Mercury, and 7) Moon.

If you check my previous post you’ll probably notice that is NOT the order of the days associated with our planets in today’s calendar. Well, there is one more important tidbit. Remember the couple of lines about needing 24 hours at the beginning of this piece? Well, astrology played an important role in the past, and each hour of the day was ruled by a planet. The order assigned to each successive hour was the order just discussed. So day 1, hour 1 was ruled by Saturn. Day 1, hour 2 was ruled by Jupiter and so on. When you come to the end of the day and start hour 1 of day 2 you just pick up where you left off on day one.

So cycling through our 7 planets throughout our 24 hour day, Saturn rules hour 1, 8, 15 and 22. Hour 23 is ruled by Jupiter and hour 24 is ruled by Mars. So hour 1 of day 2 is ruled by the next object in line, the Sun.

Do that for 7 days and you get the order we have today… with one final curve to throw at you. You’ll notice this lineup has the week starting on Saturday, which it was in the world of Exodus. Upon their flight from Egypt the Jews made it the last day of the week out of hatred for their oppressors.

So there you have it. Rather involved but certainly fascinating!