Tuning a week

We all know that the days of the week take their names from classical or Germanic gods. But why the order?

The order of the week is not the order of the planets in the sky, which is, as we find in Dante: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. The order of days starts in the middle, and the pattern is 4, 1, 5, 2, 6, 3, 7.

In his The Last Word in Prophecy , C. E. Douglas claims that the week follows the tuning method of a seven-string lyre. Strings were named for gods, and the lyre had to be tuned from the “Sun” string, the fourth, which enabled the lyre to be strung as a chain of fifths (an octave above the “moon” is the same as the fifth above the sun string). He adds, “It is not known when or where this curious and most intriguing application of mysticism to everyday life originated. That it is of high antiquity is clear from the fact that long before the Christian era it was rooted in popular use to such an extent that no attempt was made to change the order in accordance with Alexandrine astronomical theory,” which knew that Mercury was closer to the sun than Venus. He speculates that “the origin is to be sought among the builders of the ‘Tower of Babel’ or rather of those pyramids in Babylon, the seven stages of which were dedicated to the planetary gods.”

Our week is ordered so that terrestrial time harmonizes with celestial music.