• home
• about
• new
• essays
• AI
• book

Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

The Planetary Week

A Fossil of the Mythic Mind

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

How the Constellations Got Their Names

Long before clocks and calendars, the sky itself was humanity's first timepiece. The earliest herdsmen and farmers noticed that the same star patterns rose and set with the seasons. These constellations became signposts in time — guides for planting, harvesting, and ritual.

The Sumerians and later the Babylonians gave these star groups names drawn from their daily and religious life. They saw in them gods, animals, and mythical beings: the Bull of Heaven, the Great Twins, the Lion, the Scorpion.

By around 500 BCE, Babylonian astronomer-priests had mapped a narrow belt of the sky — the zodiac — divided into twelve equal sections, each 30 degrees wide, through which the Sun, Moon, and planets seemed to wander.

Each sector bore the name of the constellation it contained:

When the Greeks inherited this Babylonian star map, they retold it in their own mythic idiom:

The Bull became Zeus's disguise, the Twins became Castor and Pollux, the Virgin became Astraea or Persephone.

In this way, the sky was transformed into a mythological stage, a drama of gods and heroes projected upon the heavens.

Thus, the constellations were not “discovered” but imagined — a creative blend of observation and story, of astronomy and meaning-making.

They gave rhythm to the year and a moral narrative to the cosmos.

And from this habit of reading the heavens, an even subtler pattern of time was born.

From the Zodiac to the Week

The same Babylonians who charted the zodiac also noticed that seven celestial bodies moved independently of the fixed stars:

Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

These were the “wanderers” — planetai — each representing a divine power.

Since the lunar month lasts about 29½ days, dividing it into four parts yielded weeks of seven days, one for each heavenly body.

Thus began the planetary week, a fusion of celestial observation and divine hierarchy.

Through Greek and Roman adoption, this pattern entered Western civilization:

Sunday (Sun), Monday (Moon), Tuesday (Mars/Tiw), Wednesday (Mercury/Woden), Thursday (Jupiter/Thor), Friday (Venus/Freya), Saturday (Saturn).

The sequence itself was determined not by distance but by a curious astrological-hour system that cycled the seven planets through the 24 hours of each day.

The planet ruling the first hour gave its name to the day — producing the order we still follow.

What started as a cosmic rhythm became a cultural constant.

The Disenchantment of Time

Today, we no longer live in a world where planets are gods or constellations divine omens.

The Sun is a star, the planets are worlds, and the constellations are arbitrary projections of bright dots onto the night sky.

Yet our week remains structured by these ancient associations.

Nobody seriously believes that Monday's “lunar” mood or Friday's “Venusian” charm has any objective force.

We keep the words, but the cosmos that once animated them has fallen silent.

The planetary week persists as a fossil of that vanished worldview — an exquisite relic of the time when the heavens spoke to us.

Re-enchantment or Repetition?

Modern interpreters sometimes attempt to revive the symbolic side of this system.

They recast the seven planetary days as archetypes: Mars as energy, Venus as love, Saturn as discipline, and so forth.

It sounds sophisticated — even Jungian — but it remains a form of symbolic recycling.

The structure survives, hollowed of its original causality.

To treat Tuesday as “the day of assertion” is to romanticize a dead order.

It gives us poetry, not cosmology.

As Wilber might say, this is translation, not transformation: the mythic framework has been reinterpreted, not transcended.

A Truly Transpersonal Time

If we genuinely wanted to reconnect our sense of time with the cosmos, we would turn not to Babylonian astrology but to modern cosmology and ecology.

We might anchor ourselves in:

• the Earth's actual revolutions and axial tilt,
• the rhythms of tides and seasons,
• or the vast evolutionary story of matter and life.

That would be a post-mythic, transpersonal calendar — rooted in real cosmic process, not inherited symbolism.

The Fossil in Our Calendar

And yet, there's something haunting about this endurance.

Each time we say Thursday or Monday, we unknowingly repeat the language of an ancient sky religion.

The gods no longer move the heavens, but their names still move our lips.

The planetary week thus stands as a fossil of the mythic mind — a silent reminder of the age when humanity looked upward and found not empty space, but a living story.

We no longer share that story, but its shadow still orders our time.