Have you ever considered how strange our week is?

By this, I mean we get to the end of its seven days and fall off into an infinity of named celestial objects like Gemmda5, Godiano554, Artuix Sunburst and on, and on, and on…

But no, we don’t… I made them up. Instead, we look out at the cosmos and name (in various languages) our periods of wakefulness after seven of the ‘ancient planets’, which repeat, infinitely. Our whole universe is patterned with a plate of rotating flavours from which we (subjectively) transmit the qualities of one-seventh of our lives.

We have:

Sun – day (easy enough, even in English)

Mon – day (Moon’s day. In French, which is very helpful in this regard – Lundi, after La Lune – the Moon)

Tues – day (English not much help, but French comes to our rescue: Mardi – Mars Day)

Wednes – day (French is Mercredi which sounds a lot like Mercury)

Thurs – day (Thor’s day, possibly… not much help. French gives us Jeudi, which hints at Jupiter)

Fri -day (French: Vendredi, clearly Venus)

Satur – day (Simply Saturn’s day)

And then, back to Sunday

So, we name our days as: Sunday – Sun’s day; Monday – Moon’s day; Tuesday – Mars’ day; Wednesday – Mercury’s Day; Thursday – Jupiter’s Day; Friday – Venus’ Day; Saturday – Saturn’s Day)

Do we simply have an anachronism – a naming convention for the days of a repeating week based upon an ancient view of our solar system – including the ‘solar’ in our solar system? You might think we would have replaced them with something like the European SI units: OneDay, TwoDay, ThreeDay and so forth, ending at SevenDay.

Or is there something deeper?

Do these planets link us with something so real in our existence, that they – or what they represent – deserve to cycle within our lives every ‘week’.

In this series of posts, we will examine whether this ancient cycle of Sun – Moon – Mars – Mercury – Jupiter – Venus – Saturn – Sun – Moon really links us with the forces in our solar system, or whether the connections are more subtle; and therefore, potentially, more powerful.

And why seven? Who said there should be seven days in our week? Why not, for example, twelve?

To being this journey of discovery, we need to consider the importance of ‘seven’ and the science in which the qualities of these seven ancient presences (the original planets) were first studied.

©Stephen Tanham

Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.

The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.

Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.