the 7 planets and 24 hours

Analogs of time from the hour to the year.

I’ve been experimenting with ways to divide the year, hoping to break our dependence on the Gregorian calendar as the de facto global time frame.

Although the current 7-day week came from the Jewish Calendar, there were astronomical variations floating around as well, which assigned “planets” to the 7 days of the week. This is still evident in some weekday names (depending on your language), such as Sunday, Monday, and Saturday.

7 pointed star in a circle
clockwise from bottom left:
Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn

The above image can be read around the circle either clockwise from the shortest orbit (Moon at 27 days, Saturn at 29 years) or along the paths of the star in order of the weekdays: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars (Tuesday), Mercury (Wednesday), Jupiter (Thursday), and Venus (Friday)

the Story of Time

Myths for our Global Era (2012 – 2272)

We’ve inherited myths of Creation, the separation of the Sky from the Earth setting the Sun, Moon, and Planets into motion, from any number of oral and literate traditions, syncretic combinations of ancient and proximate stories, however, when we (i.e. the ‘West’) turned away from Christianity to embrace the sciences and reason, we failed to emphasize the need for a new mythology by which to organize and better access new discoveries and knowledge.

We have the tale of the Big Bang and the evolution of the Universe, its structure and our Galaxy’s place in it (as far as we can observe), our Sun’s place in the Galaxy, Earth’s place in the Solar System, and our place on Earth. As well, we have accumulated huge amounts of information regarding metabolism, DNA, and other molecular and subatomic processes. What myth could possibly incorporate all that?

The thing about myths is, they don’t have to incorporate everything, they simply have to have an underlying structure that can accommodate our particular way of developing knowledge.

Days unConfused