No Ordinary Day of the Week: Intro to Magical Days

Some witches plan their magic around the phases of the moon, while others plan around the season and the sabbat, others plan around the days of the week, and others use a combination of any or all the above. Weeks are basically a short cycle of days with work, leisure, and worship allocated for certain days within that cycle. Those weeks were often divisions of the seasonal cycle of the area that culture was from.

We take days and weeks for granted. Our ancient ancestors had to figure out a calendar that worked for them. Early calendars were figured out often around worship cycles, planting times, and astrological events. The number of days in the week varied between cultures depending on what they felt was sacred, numerologically significant, or mathematically appropriate.

Ancient Rome utilized an eight-day week, as well as the Theravada Buddhist of Burma, the Etruscans, and several Celtic tribes.

The eight-day week of the Etruscans was referred to as the nundinum and was developed in the 8th or 7thCentury BCE. The nundinum was focused on their market days and was passed onto the Romans in the 6th Century BCE.

The Welsh started their week with a night and ended with a night. In Welsh, the word for week was “Wythnos” which translates to “Eight Nights”. A night at the beginning of the week and a night at the end of the week that surrounds 7 days.

The traditional Chinese Calendar during the Xia Dynasty of the Bronze Age had days grouped in 9- or 10-day weeks. These weeks were known as xun, each month consisted of three xun. The first week of a month is Early xun, the middle week was Mid xun, and the last week of the month was Late xun. This structure led to public holidays every 5 or 10 days, where is the Han Dynasty, people were legally required to rest every 5 days, and these breaks became known as huan or wash days. This Chinese lent their 10-day week to Korea, the weeks are known as sun, and Japan, where they are called jun.

The oldest known calendar was a lunisolar based calendar discovered at Gobleki Tepi and is over 13,000 years old. It doesn’t demark weeks, but rather days and major astronomical events. One of the things marked on the calendar is a mark denoting a comet strike from 13000 years ago the caused a mini-ice age.

Our modern calendar comes from mainly the ancient Romans. They adopted the 7-day calendar under Constantine and Christianity refined it through the Hebrew calendar. Each language has its own names for the days and day that the week begins on, but they are close enough in names that magical correspondences begin to surface.

In the English language calendar, days of the week are associated to the Classic, Roman Era, planets.

• · Monday=Moon,

• · Tuesday=Mars,

• · Wednesday= Mercury,

• · Thursday= Jupiter,

• · Friday= Venus,

• · Saturday-Saturn,

• · Sunday=The Sun.

There is a lot of debate on why that order of planets was chosen and no concise answers to why exist. Though it is suggested that the explanation can be found is a lost 100CE treatise by Plutarch.

Constantine, around 600 CE, made Sunday the beginning of the week in his calendar as a way of honoring the Sun (Sol Invictus) or God at the beginning of the week. The idea being that you start the week off with a day to rest and honor God and up until several decades ago, Sunday was still legally a day of rest due to blue laws.

By the 4thCentury CE, the calendar of Constantine was in use throughout the Roman Empire and when the Romans left, the calendar stayed. The Latin names of the Days of the week also remained and evolved in much of the former Roman Empire.

· Sunday- dies solis. Replaced with dies Dominicus

· Monday- dies Lunae (moon)

· Tuesday- dies Martis (Mars)

· Wednesday- dies Mercurii (Mercury)

· Thursday- dies Lovis (Jove, Jupiter)

· Friday- dies Veneris (Venus)

· Saturday- dies Saturni (Saturn)

In English we take our day of the week names from Germanic and Norse based languages.

· Sunday- Sunnanddaeg meaning “Sun’s Day”

· Monday- Monandaeg meaning “Moon’s Day”

· Tuesday- Tiwesdaeg meaning “Tiw’s Day”. Tiw is another name for the Norse god, Tyr. Tyr is often considered the Norse equivalent to Mars.

· Wednesday- Wodensdaeg meaning “Woden’s Day. Wooden was considered the equivalent to Mercury. In Old German, Wednesday was also called Mittwoch or midweek.

· Thursday- Thunresdaeg or “thunor’s day” Thunor or thunder was the personification of Thor, who was equated to Jupiter. In German, this day is known as Donnerstag or thunder day.

· Friday- Fridgedaeg or Frig’s Day. Frig was equated to the Norse goddess Venus.

· Saturday – Saeturnsesdaeg or Saturn’s Day. This day was also known to the Norse as laugardagr or Lanundery day and in Low German as Sunnavend or Sunday Eve.

Through those classic Latin connections, we assign each day with correspondences and magical purposes. True magic lies with believing the correspondences you utilize have power and meaning. Over the next few weeks, we will be going over the correspondence and magic associated with each day of the week. We want to give you more tools to improve and empower you magically. Days of the week can guide you to what day is best for what type of magic and what gods to call on but can also be a guide to what days to honor the deities you follow. As always, in magic the more you know and can utilize the more power you can have.