7 Days a Week, Pt. 2: Magic & the Planets

Hello again, Readers,

Welcome to Part 2 of this two-part blog mini-series! It's taken much, MUCH longer than I thought to get this second post together, and multiple people have asked me about daily magic and related things since I started working on it, so I'm excited to finally have it posted for everyone!

If you haven't yet, go back and read Part 1, Planets & Deity Names, which focused on explaining how the English names for the days of the week came about, and how they are related to the planets and various Deities. In this post, we will be taking the information from Part 1 and using it to determine the best magical timing for certain types of spells or other workings, to set intentions that align with the planets and/or Deities, and so on.

Image by me, symbol images from solarsystem.nasa.gov

The days of the week as we know them in English are as follows:
Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday.


These names are associated with the following "planets", respectively:
The Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn.


In magic, we talk about a concept known as magical timing, which is the process of choosing the "best time", according to various correspondences, to do a magical working. Timing can include one, or a layering of many time-based associations, from the Moon phase, to the day of the week, even down to the hour of the day should you choose to delve that deep. In this post, we're focusing on the magic of the Days of the Week.

7 Days a Week, Pt. 1: Planets & Deity Names

Hello, Readers,

As I've been reading through some beginner-Witch material again lately, I've started thinking again about basics--building blocks of magic, timing, simple things we can do everyday--and one of the things that came to my mind was timing and intention based on the day of the week. Many people know where our English names for the weekdays came from, but many people also still do not. I remember years ago, when I was first studying Paganism and Witchcraft, mentioning the origin of the days of the week to my mother, who had no idea! So I figure in 2019, maybe some other people still haven't had this come up for them, either. And even if you do know this naming origin stuff, a Part 2 of this post will be going up next, talking about using the planetary and/or Deity associations with the days of the week for deciding what kinds of magic to do on what days. If that is a sort of magical timing you're interested in, look out for that post next.

Image by me, using symbol images from solarsystem.nasa.gov

Days of the Week: Planets & Deities

There are seven days in our calendar weeks, and this has been the case for centuries although it was not always that way. The Roman Empire was responsible for the shift sometime between the 1st and 3rd centuries, according to the Wiki article which I will link below with other sources. There were also seven "classical planets", or moving celestial bodies that, at the time, could be seen with the naked eye and were known to the astronomers of classical antiquity. We would not use the term "planet" for all of them today, as the definition has changed over the years. One of them is our Sun, which we know as a star. The other is our Moon, which we consider a "satellite" today because a planet would have to be orbiting the Sun directly, whereas our Moon orbits Earth.

These seven classical planetary bodies were the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Earth was not included because, well, we live here. It was all about what we could see up in space from where we were.