This is what it says in the new astrological durations section in TMRE:
”An Astrological Hour is the time for a sign (its constellation) to move from rising to centered over horizon, or centered to fully risen (12 signs, 24 hours per day)”
And that means…what? Is an astrological “hour” 12 hours? 2 hours? I have no idea. I can’t find any clarification of this. This is like defining a word with the same word.
12 astrological hours per day, 12 astrological hours per night. Sunrise to sunrise is 24 astrological hours.
Note that this means the exact length of each hour will shift over time as days shift in length from summer to winter to summer.
Or you can just make it simple and say that one astrological hour is about the same as one of our modern hours.
I think that you (and TMRE) are actually referring to planetary hours.
Many older magical texts will mention that a rite should be performed during the day and hour of some Planet. This is referring to the old system of planetary hours. Planetary hours use a sequence of Planets based on their observed speed and so assumed distance from Earth (at the center):
Saturn - Jupiter - Mars - Sun - Venus - Mercury - Moon
This was known as the "Chaldaean Order" of the Planets.
Planetary hours also use an old system of time keeping called "unequal hours". This means that there are 12 unequal hours of the day (from sunrise to sunset) followed by 12 unequal hours of the night from sunset to sunrise). Since the relative length of day and night changes throughout the year, you can understand that the "hours" will be of different length each day, hence "unequal".
The unequal hours are assigned to the Planets in the following way. Each day of the week is ruled by a Planet. In fact, our names for the days of the week are based on the 7 Planets of antiquity (sometimes by way of Norse deities):
Sunday -- Sun
Monday -- Moon
Tuesday -- (Tiw, god of war) -- Mars
Wednesday -- (Woden, trickster) -- Mercury
Thursday -- (Thor, lightning) -- Jupiter
Friday -- (Frigga, love) -- Venus
Saturday -- Saturn
The first unequal hour after sunrise on each day is ruled by the Planet ruling that day, e.g. the first hour of the day on Sunday is the hour of the Sun. The hours are then assigned to the 7 Planets in the Chaldaean Order given above, e.g. the second hour of the day on Sunday is the hour of Venus. This continues through the hours of the day and hours of the night, when a remarkable thing happens… The 12th hour of the night on Sunday is the hour of Mercury. The next Planet in the Chaldean Order is the Moon; so the next hour, the first hour of the day on Monday is the hour of the Moon!
Thus the 7 Planets give us not only the names of the days of the week, but also (through the planetary hours in their Chaldaean Order) the sequence of those days.
I don't know what hours based on the Signs would be. Does someone have a source for this?
That’s in there, but it’s a separate thing. Very next section in fact, titled: favorable hour for spellcasting. Both fall under the auspices of the Celestial Magic virtue. But what I was asking about was just the intended length of the “astrological hour”, which is an alternate duration for spellcasting, which does not, in the rules at least, vary by the hour of the day and the planet that rules over it. (No moreso than diameter varies from 2 minutes as a standard duration regardless of which 2 minutes of a day it is)
It is just equivalent to a modern hour. The twelve signs of the Zodiac pass across the sky & return to their (essentially) starting positions in 24 hours; so each sign is two hours long. The first half of a sign (as it rises or sets) is one hour; the second half of a sign (as it rises or sets) is an hour.
This is a simplification for the game. The ‘hour’ guideline for spells is useful because Hermetic magic does not generally have access to a duration between ‘Diameter’ and ‘Sun’.
Woden is actually Odin. The Trickster is Loki which is more associated with Saturday, the day of washing, hot baths, fun and games.
W
I always thought that Odin was quite a trickster himself…
It is true that we generally consider Loki to be a trickster. But, for whatever reason, the Romans considered Odin to be a localization of Mercury. Presumably because Mercury has many other associations that simply being a trickster. So the association in that list is accurate.
The question for astrology is which planet the day is associated, not the accuracy of the equivalences of the gods. Woden was “the gray wanderer” and was thus associated with the planet mercury, which was named after the Roman messenger god. The fact that Woden is a leader while Mercury is a trickster is incidental to the rational.
I am pretty sure that Tacitus wasn’t talking astrology when he equated Mercury and Odin. They are both considered psychopomps, divine messengers, travelers, and involved with speech, poetry, and communication.
A big factor is that what we know about ancient religions is extremely incomplete and based more on mythology than on religious practice. It would be like trying to figure out how catholicism worked just from having some Bible stories.
The question is about Hermetic Astrology, so why are you bringing Tacitus into the conversation since he wasn’t talking about astrology? I’m not certain I would classify Odin as a divine messenger given that he was the head of the pantheon, and I can’t recall him really being connected with poetry, though his connection to the runes gives a clear connection to communication and language.
But like I said, the question is specifically about astrology, so how well the rest of it matches really doesn’t matter.
My point is that Woden and Mercury are not associated because they are associated with the same planet. The Germanic peoples adopted the Roman 7 day calendar and assigned the names based on the gods considered equivalent to the Roman god. Odin was not associated with the planet Mercury on his own.
The post I responded to was not about Astrology, but about the attributes of the Gods (namely being a trickster). I was pointing out that regardless of whether we think of Odin as being a trickster or like Mercury, both the Ancient Romans and the Ancient Germans did think they were alike.
Read up on this here:
You find there especially:
Simek emphasizes the paucity of evidence for a widespread interpretatio germanica, as opposed to the well-attested opposite interpretatio romana, and notes that comparison with Roman gods is insufficient to reconstruct ancient Germanic gods, or equate them definitively with those of later Norse mythology.[2]
I am actually pretty familiar with the fact that we know very little about actual Germanic religion and how they conceived of their gods. And that much of what we do know about the later Norse comes from writings of Christianized people of Norse ancestry, so very likely not as accurate as we would like. There’s certainly evidence that some Germanic tribes held Tiw to be leader of the Gods, not Woden. At least at certain points. But mostly what we know is that we don’t actually know much.
But if someone is disputing that the Germans adopted the Roman week and paired their gods with the Roman ones in doing so, that would be news to me. That doesn’t mean that they literally thought Mercury and Woden were the same entity. But there’s certainly no reason to think that they were making an Astrological statement that both Woden and Mercury were associated with the same planet in the heavens that I am aware of.
The OP correctly linked dies Mercurii with Woden and Mercury. The Romans really did think they were aligned and the Germanic tribes either rolled with it or perhaps thought so too. So that other guy who said “No, Woden is Odin and not a trickster” was off base with his talk about Loki, who is not attested as being a Germanic figure. That was the post I was objecting to.
In general "the Germans" and their relations to the Latin calendar and gods are not known to us. Tacitus (Odin - Wikipedia) lists for the gods of the Suebi romanized analogues:
The earliest records of the Germanic peoples were recorded by the Romans, and in these works Odin is frequently referred to—via a process known as interpretatio romana (where characteristics perceived to be similar by Romans result in identification of a non-Roman god as a Roman deity)—as the Roman god Mercury. The first clear example of this occurs in the Roman historian Tacitus's late 1st-century work Germania, where, writing about the religion of the Suebi (a confederation of Germanic peoples), he comments that "among the gods Mercury is the one they principally worship. They regard it as a religious duty to offer to him, on fixed days, human as well as other sacrificial victims. Hercules and Mars they appease by animal offerings of the permitted kind" and adds that a portion of the Suebi also venerate "Isis". In this instance, Tacitus refers to the god Odin as "Mercury", Thor as "Hercules", and Týr as "Mars". The "Isis" of the Suebi has been debated and may represent "Freyja".[23]
From these Roman analogues Germanic people living with Romans - like near Cologne or generally around the Rhine - could take over the seven Roman days, their names and the gods these were associated with. An Interpretatio Germanica of Germanic gods under Roman names might then have developed over centuries of cohabitation like in England or the Netherlands. An example is the northern English votive inscription to a Mars Thingsus (3rd century AD).
For the curious, there’s a myth where the Allfather steals* The Mead of Poetry from some giants, and later…distributes it, shall we say, across the world, while fleeing in the form of an eagle. The mead seems to be not just about “flowery, beautiful poetry” and more “information” in the way a bard has hundreds of things memorized.
*Wins? Takes as compensation for labor? No one is HAPPY that He got it, for sure.
Maybe some of the Mercury/Odin parallels came in the “Plucky Thief Archetype”
Odin is a wanderer and a psychopomp (his horse is literally a funeral bier). Who else would that be but Mercury?
The fact is that the idea that the gods had to correlate one to one was probably entirely within the Roman camp on the issue. “Who else would that be but Mercury” only makes sense if you assume that Odin has to be the same as a Roman god. For the Romans this was important because drawing these parallels helped them to maintain their empire by drawing a lot of disparate traditions into a central core (sort of an early version of the Christians incorporating and Christianizing local customs and practices). For the Germans and Norse it was probably a shrug and roll with it, maybe thinking through that sure, the fastest planet should be associated with the wanderer and then worrying about more important questions, like how they were going to keep those pesky Romans from invading their land.
For what it’s worth, still reading TMRE and in the chapter on the Neo-Mercurians, the authors wrote, emphasis mine:
”It is believed by them (the Neo-Mercurians) that Wotan was the Germanic form of Mercury, and Odin the Norse. In Celtic lands he was praised as Lugh. Greece knew him as Hermes, and in Egypt, temples once dedicated to Thoth provide the preferred location for the practice of his rites.”
Exactly this - as one of the authors. Sorry if it was unclear. The actual size of hours vary but use modern sixty minute hours and its going to be pretty much close enough for Hermetic work. If actually summoning demons, check with the Line Editor. Neil and I are not responsible for any magical mishaps that may befall you from using TMRE as a grimoire. 