Planetary hours

First published 27 Jul 2026 · Last reviewed 27 Jul 2026 · 4 traditions attested

The premise runs under everything else in this archive: time is not neutral. Each hour belongs to a planet, and the planet's nature makes the hour open to some work and closed to others. A talisman made in the wrong hour is held inert; a name written outside its permitted hours, invalid. Timing is not ceremony here — it is a condition of the work.

¶ Islamic havas — the four permitted hours

The registered havas record makes timing a rule of validity. Writing is confined to the hours of the Moon, Jupiter, Sun, and Venus; all other planetary hours are excluded, so that the same operation is valid at one hour and void at another.

The hour does not stand alone. It is chosen together with the planet suited to the aim, the matching element, and the person's own star — the whole set must agree, which is why the talisman-maker calculates the moment before inscribing anything. The wider literature places this inside the "science of stars, spheres, signs, and stations" that the havas tradition drew on.

¶ Grimoire — the fullest system

The Key of Solomon sets out planetary hours in the most explicit form in the archive. Day and night are each divided into twelve hours, and the hours are ruled in turn by the seven planets, beginning with the planet of the day itself. Each operation is then matched to the day and hour of the planet whose nature fits its purpose — and the record is precise about those natures.

Saturn and Mars serve works of discord and destruction; the Sun, Jupiter, and Venus works of favour, love, and grace; the Moon novelties and change; Mercury eloquence and the recovery of lost things. Each planet carries its own metal and colour too — the correspondences that decide the material of a pentacle as its hour decides the timing.

¶ Turkic folk — timing by star, not clock

The Turkic record keeps the same conviction — that the moment matters — but reads it from the sky rather than a planetary-hour table. Ritual timing follows the stars and their risings: Venus and the Pleiades (Ülker) among the markers, with the appearance of certain stars opening the proper time for a rite. It is astronomical timing without the twelve-hour planetary grid.

¶ Coptic — the day, not the hour

¶ Four ways to read the clock

All four agree that the moment carries quality; they divide only on how finely they cut it — the grimoire to the individual hour, the havas to four of them, the Turkic record to a star's rising, the Coptic to the day. The shared premise is the finding: that a rite performed at the wrong time is not merely late, but wrong.

¶ Asked and answered

How long is a "planetary hour"?

Not a fixed sixty minutes. In the grimoire system day and night are each divided into twelve, so an hour's length shifts with the season — longer by day in summer, shorter in winter — because it is a twelfth of daylight, not a clock hour (KS p.17).

Why only four permitted hours in the Islamic source?

The registered witness restricts writing to the Moon, Jupiter, Sun, and Venus — the benefic planets — and excludes the rest, so that the malefic hours cannot spoil the work (KT p.106). The source states the restriction without arguing it; the archive records it as given.

Do the traditions agree on which planet rules what?

Broadly, where they overlap: benefic Sun, Jupiter, and Venus for favour; Saturn and Mars for harm. But only the grimoire lays out the full table (KS pp.18, 20); the others use fragments of the same scheme or, in the Turkic case, a different sky-reading altogether.

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