For the ancients, the week was a tuned cosmos.

According to ancient astronomy, the planets were in crystal spheres that formed a seven-stringed lyre in the sky. Moving from earth outward, the seven strings are: moon, Mercury, Venus, sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. If you ascended from earth all the way up to the sphere of fixed stars, you’d pass through those seven spheres.

Now, tune that list by fifths.

Start with the moon, count five including the moon, and you come to Mars. Start again with Mars, count five including Mars and you get to Mercury. Etc. The tuned list comes out:

Moon

Mars

Mercury

Jupiter

Venus

Saturn

Sun

Which are the days of the week, once we substitute Germanic names for most of the planets: Monday, Tuesday (Tir), Wednesday (Wodan), Thursday (Thor), Friday (Freia), Saturday (Saturn), and Sunday (obvious).

Now, if this seems far-fetched, let’s back up. Someone had to name the planets in the particular order that they did, assigning the name of a god to each of the planets. Perhaps something in the qualities of the planets themselves suggested the name for the planet: Mars is a good name for the blood-red planet, Venus for the bright whiteness of the evening star.

It’s also clear that the planetary names are quite widely used for the days of the week. Monday is Dies Lunis in Latin, Lunedi in Italian, Lundi in French, Lunes in Spanish, Hemera Selenes in Greek (Selene being the word for moon), Mandag in Swedish, Maandag in Dutch, Montag in German. Even in Japanese, the first day of the week means “moon day” (Getsu Yo Bi). Almost universally, the first day of the week is named for the first planet in the ancient solar system.

If the names of the days were simply following the planetary order, the next day should be named for Mercury. Again quite commonly, the second day is named instead for the fifth planet: Dies Martis in Latin, Martedi in Italian, Mardi in French, Martes in Spanish, Hemera Areos in Greek (Ares), Tisdag in Swedish (for Tyr or Tir the war god). Dutch and German diverge here, both using names with the particle “dins” or “diens,” which means “assembly.” But the older German name for the second day is Ziostag, and Zio is equivalent to Tyr/Tir.

We could keep going, but we’ll stop with Wednesday. The third planet is Venus, but that is not the name assigned to the third day of the week. Rather, it is again very common to use the next fifth, Mercury. Wednesday is Dies Mercurii in Latin, Mercoledi in Italian, Mercredi in French, Miercoles in Spanish, Hemera Hermu in Greek (Hermes being the equivalent of Mercury). Wodin (Wodan) was thought of as the Germanic Mercury, so in Germanic languages Mercury’s day becomes Wodin’s day: Woensdag in Dutch, Wodansdag in older German. Odin was the Norse equivalent of Oden, so in the Scandinavian languages Wednesday is named for Oden.

The pattern continues through the rest of the week in many, many languages, as you can discover with a quick Google search. Someone at some point in the ancient past decided to name the planets for the gods, the days of the week for the planets, but also decided not to name the days of the week in the same order that the planets were named but not to assign the names randomly either. The days are consistently named as a tuning-by-fifths of the heavens.

Each week was a passage through a tuned cosmos. Time is planetary travel. Earthly time is harmonization on the music of the spheres.

The initial ideas here come from James Jordan’s lectures on Revelation.