The Week (Colson)/Chapter 5

by F. H. Colson

§ 5

The Driving-Force behind the Week

We now come to a different question. How did the planetary week gain its ascendancy in the Empire? I do not think that the difficulty of this has been properly appreciated. We talk glibly of one nation 'getting it' from another, but as a matter of fact a new time-cycle is not a thing which spreads automatically. The most natural method of propagation is by official authority. Let those in power conceive the idea that the innovation is useful and take steps to bring it into force, and no doubt the rest is easy. That is the way in which great reforms in the calendar, such as the Julian or Gregorian, have been established, or in recent years our own 'summer time.' But as we have seen there is complete silence as to any official enforcement or even recognition of the planetary week, and this is a matter in which silence does imply non-existence. Shall we then say it was just a fashion? Fashion is in many ways no doubt extremely creative. It can produce revolutions in costume, new varieties of speech and indeed new religious observances. But a new time-cycle is a much more difficult matter.

How do we ourselves remember the days of the week? The obvious answer is that something happens on one or more of them. If by some means or other we lose count in the course of the week, Sunday is unmistakable, even if personally we have no religious feeling about the day. So, too, school half-holiday or early-closing days force themselves on the notice of those who are not directly affected by them. But if nothing happens it is very doubtful whether a weeksequence could maintain, much less establish, itself. I have not had any opportunity of finding out what is the experience of parties or individuals, such as explorers or hunters, if they are cut off from civilization for any length of time. But I observe that writers of fiction which deals with this type of adventure have felt that week-keeping would be a difficulty. Both Robinson Crusoe and that pious Protestant pastor the hero of the Swiss Family Robinson were strict Sabbatarians. But even they missed a Sunday or two, though I think they took steps later to prevent a recurrence of this.

But in the planetary week nothing, so far as we know, happened. Nothing in the heaven above: the planets rolled on their courses regardless of the days assigned to them. Nothing on the earth below: there was, as we have seen, no official or civil recognition, and outside Jew, Christian and possibly Mithraist, we know of no formal rite or meeting. We can only suppose that the plain man who did not belong to these bodies rose in the morning and passed the day with a definite consciousness that it was in some way or other under the influence of a particular one of the mysterious Seven.

One limitation must of course be made to this. When a usage like the planetary week has reached a certain point of acceptance, it is carried further by its own momentum. When a majority of the community, or perhaps even a large and solid minority has adopted it from conviction, the rest may accept it otiosely from mere convenience. If the customer thinks in weekdays, the shopman who ministers to his needs must at least learn to understand him. Some considerable time before the general acceptance, to which Dion testifies, had become a fact, the week-days had probably come to be taken for granted without much serious thought by a large body of people. But in the earlier stages when conviction not convenience was the only motive we must, I think, postulate some very strong driving-force, Glaube or Aberglaube, to maintain among widely isolated groups or persons this new form of time-measurement, which if once lost by a single lapse would be lost for ever^[1].

The general nature of this driving-force has been partially explained by what has been said about the time sovereignty of the planets, and it may be better understood, or perhaps I should say that the difficulty of understanding it will be better appreciated, when we have considered the history of the astrological movement during this period.

Divination by means of the heavenly bodies was not a primitive idea with either the Greeks or the Romans. Their superstitions took rather the form of auguries from the flight of birds, or from the entrails of slaughtered animals, and of dream-interpretation and various omens. There is no astrology in Homer or the Greek dramatists. It was perhaps the contact of East and West brought about by Alexander's armies which set the ball rolling. The universal belief in the Roman world that astrology was 'Chaldaean' in origin is probably so far true that the cruder astrological ideas of Babylon were grafted on to Greek astronomy to produce the elaborate system which prevailed to the Middle Ages. But there is, so far as I know, no historical evidence of its prevalence in the Empire of Alexander and his successors till the time when the Greek in his turn succumbed to the domination of Rome. The earliest historical mention is, I believe, the warning of Cato in his book on agriculture (in the first half of the second century B.C.) to the farmer against consulting the 'Chaldaean,' and in 139 B.C. an edict was passed expelling them from Italy. These facts of course presuppose some prolonged period, during which the movement had time to acquire sufficient force to become dangerous; and before Cato, the most influential of the philosophical sects, the Stoics, who certainly had afterwards a considerable leaning to astrology, may have shewn this tendency. In the first century B.C. the mentions become more frequent. Sulla, for instance, had an astrological prediction forecasting his death. Cicero deals with astrology in his book on divination. His contemporary Posidonius, an important name in the history of Stoicism, did much to give a philosophical form to the belief. When we come to the end of that century and the beginning of our era, we have Augustus publishing his 'theme of geniture' and using it in his coinage^[2], while Virgil bases on it an elaborate bit of flattery in the opening of his Georgics. Manilius writes a didactic poem on astrology. Horace alludes to the competing influences of Jupiter and Saturn^[3] and assures Maecenas that their two stars are indissolubly bound together. Propertius' allusions are still fuller. Later again we hear of astrological predictions in connexion with Tiberius, Nero, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian, while Juvenal launches his satire against the ladies who regulate every action by their astrological books^[4]. Above all we read frequently of edicts against astrologers and astrology, a superstition which Tacitus says will always be forbidden and always retained in the Roman state. All this evidence, which is merely a selection from what is available, undoubtedly shews that astrology had made very great headway during these centuries, but it does not to my mind completely account for such a phenomenon as the establishment of the week.

In the first place, striking as is the rapid spread of astrological belief during this period, when we compare it with the complete absence of any such ideas in earlier times, it must not be exaggerated. The evidence we get is largely of the nature of gossip about great persons. It is no doubt more than could be accumulated by future historians with regard to any single one of what I may, I hope with the minimum offence, call the eccentricities of our time. But if we combined these 'eccentricities'—Christian science, theosophy, spiritualism, the various forms of fortune-telling, and psycho-analysis— a considerable body of proof of their currency could be collected from memoirs, newspapers and the like. Yet no one would suppose that these really touched the general life of the people or were capable of bringing into existence a new time-cycle. So with the astrological movement there is no evidence apart from the week that it went down to the bed-rock of life. A simple test of this may be obtained by comparing the quantity of the allusions to astrology in Augustan literature with that of the allusions to the accepted theology or mythology. In the Odes of Horace the names of the gods appear on about every page: to astrology there are, I think, just two allusions. Much the same may be said of Virgil and in various degrees of every other poet, except of course Manilius. The one fact which, outweighing all the rest, testifies to the popular belief in planetary influence is the silent diffusion of the week.

Secondly, though obviously the week is connected with astrology, the tie that connects them is exceedingly loose. Though the idea of time sovereignty is an outcome of the belief that the planets control human destinies and could only be propagated where that belief had taken root, it is only a popular or semi-popular extension. Consequently in the lore of astrology proper it plays no great part. In the catalogues of the astrologers, which I mentioned in the last section, and in Vettius Valens, there is enough to shew us what the astrologers made of the week—enough to shew us that they regarded it as a system of hours as well as, or more than, of days: but these notices are only occasional. Still more significant is the fact that the full-dress refutations of astrology contain, so far as I know, not a single mention of the week system, though obviously, if it was regarded as a serious factor in astrology, it was a peculiarly vulnerable factor. Since the relations of Saturn to the other planets vary from Saturday to Saturday, how can Saturn have the same effect on human life, whenever this day recurs? The question was unanswerable; yet it is never asked. We have two such full-dress refutations which follow what were no doubt familiar lines of argument. One is a remarkable and interesting discussion by Sextus Empiricus, a writer of the later half of the second century A.D., who set himself to shew that all branches of learning were equally unreliable^[5]. The other is in St Augustine's great treatise on The City of God^[6]. Both deal with the contradictions to common sense involved in astrology, such as how, if it were true, could twins born under the same aspect of heaven have different destinies, as they do have. The fact that they do not mention the still greater absurdities involved in week observance shews that in their eyes it was hardly a part of astrological science, rather a vague popular superstition which did not need refutation. The sort of place that the week held in the estimation of later astrologers, at any rate, may perhaps be fairly judged from a curious incident in a later century^[7] . In the reign of Zeno A.D. 484 a rebel general named Leontius had himself crowned and proclaimed Emperor at sunrise on the 27th of June. He had chosen the time on skilled astrological advice. The sun was in Cancer 26°, Venus in Gemini 27°, and so on for the other planets with other astronomical data. The general conjunction was eminently favourable. All the same the attempt was a complete fiasco, and the astrologers were much disconcerted. Further consideration, however, led to the reflection that no account had been taken of the fact that the hour chosen was the first hour of Wednesday, when Mercury is regent of both hour and day; Mercury's position was apparently unfavourable in itself and might therefore be regarded as outweighing the other favourable elements. Thus the science was vindicated though at the expense of the unhappy Leontius. In this story the week appears as a sort of inferior ally, whose assistance in ordinary cases may be dispensed with, but may be called in in emergencies to save the situation.

In this case it will be observed that we have a sort of combination of astrology proper with week-lore. No universal rules are laid down for Wednesdays, but the observer is bidden to remember that Mercury is paramount in the first hour of Wednesday and then to note the positions of Mercury on that particular Wednesday and to shape his course accordingly, and this is the line taken by our earliest authority Valens. This is perhaps a trifle more rational than what we find in other authorities, who seem to hold that the laws for each hour of each day in the week are irrevocably fixed and have no reference to what may be the particular position of the paramount planets on any particular hour or day. One specimen of this stuff will, I think, be enough^[8]. I will take the hour at which I am writing, namely, about 12.30 midday of Friday, November 20th, 1925. As the sun rises about 7.30 a.m. and sets shortly after 4 p.m., the dayhours are about 43 minutes each, and we are now in the eighth of them according to the western astrological reckoning. Venus is therefore regent of both the day and the hour. The authority before me gives me advice as to four contingencies and four only. My slave may run away (this is a possibility the astrologers seem regularly to provide for): I may fall ill: I may lose or break something, or I may have a thief. During this particular hour, I find that if the slave absconds, he will either hide in my suburban farm, or in a public house with a woman: if I fall ill, I shall have a hard time, but shall recover: if I lose anything, it will be elegant earrings, and my thief will be a 'softish womanish kind of person.'^[9] In a half-hour or so of our time, we shall enter the next astrological hour, which is Mercury's, though Venus is still regent of the day. My runaway in that case will take refuge in 'the church of the martyrs': if I fall ill, I shall die: my lost property will be parchments or gilded vessels, and the thief will be an educated or literary person.

It will be seen that in all this week-lore, whether of the fantastic kind just described, the comparative lateness of which is shewn by such phrases as 'the church of the martyrs,' or in the more sober form which Valens gives it, the hour counts for as much as, if not more, than the day, and it is clear that this was the view taken in esoteric astrological circles down to the days of Chaucer. But I very much doubt whether the hour business had any hold on the popular mind. To them the week was a system of seven planetary days, not of 168 planetary hours. I judge this from the fact that the planet-hours have left no impression on language and also from the way in which Dion speaks of them. He knows that the hours are said to be dedicated to the planets, but he only knows it as a theory. The ascription of each day to a planet is to him a matter of universal knowledge. If the ascription of each hour to a planet had been an equally accepted fact, he would not have needed to give his explanation at all.

If the people had no hour-lore had they any definite day-lore? Did they think that illnesses ran a different course according to the days on which they were contracted, or that Friday's thief would be of a different stamp to Wednesday's? I know of only one scrap of evidence which bears on this, and it is a very little scrap and does not come from the earliest period. Ausonius^[10], a poet and scholar of the fourth century, a Christian by profession, though with much or more of the pagan about him, quotes a proverbial line

Cut nails on Mercury's day,
Beard on Jupiter's day,
Hair on Venus's day,

and proceeds in a little set of verses to refute this on the grounds that Mercury being the god of thieves presumably approves of sharp nails, that Jupiter is represented with a beard and Venus with long hair, and that therefore these are the wrong days for these several processes. The verses are not seriously meant and are only relevant in so far as they are founded on what we may by a stretch call a piece of folk-lore bearing on the week. On the whole we must say that we do not know what in practice the week meant to the plain man of the Empire. Yet we know that he learnt to observe it and must conclude that he had some motive for doing so, whether it took any practical form or not.

Another question which may be asked is whether the spread of the week is due in whole or in part to its being included in the ritual of particular sects or religions. I have already said that the planetary week no doubt received much support from the Sabbatical week of the Jews. So, too, the Christian acceptance of the sevenday week may have helped: though its contribution in the second century must have been small. But there is another religion which may have contributed, if not to establish, at any rate to widen its influence. That religion is Mithraism. We have heard of late years much of the various mystery religions, of the rites of Isis, Cybele, Attis and Adonis, but perhaps none has attracted so much attention as that of the Persian Sun-god Mithras. Many striking suggestions have been made about it. We are told that there was a time when it was an even chance whether Christianity or Mithraism would become the dominant religion of the Empire, and that the fixing of the feast of the Nativity of Christ close to the winter solstice was made in imitation of the Mithraistic feast in celebration of the annual birth of the Sun-god. Mr H. G. Wells in his Outline of History has assured us positively that the Christians 'borrowed Sunday from the Mithraists.'^[11] Whether sober enquiry will establish all or many of these statements remains, I think, to be seen. But at any rate the wide diffusion of Mithraism in Europe, particularly in the army, is an interesting fact.

That Mithraism should adopt week-observance when it had become general elsewhere was clearly inevitable. A religion in which the supreme object of adoration was so closely connected if not identified with the Sun could hardly fail to pay special reverence to what even non-Mithraists hailed as the Sun's day, even if it did not pay the same regard to the other planets; and when the recurrence of one day in seven is observed, we have of course the week. Cumont's statement^[12] therefore that the week and especially Sunday was observed by the Mithraists, is thoroughly credible, whatever we may think of the evidence which he gives. The real question for us is to what date we can trace the Mithraistic week. Mithraism, according to Cumont, grew to some influence in the Roman Empire during the first century A.D. and reached the height of its strength in the third. Are we to regard it as taking the lead in the spread of week-observance, or merely as being carried along in the general current and adapting its rites to its environment? We find, I think, no evidence which would lead us to take the former view. The positive indications adduced by Cumont seem on examination to be exceedingly slight. A Mithraeum at Ostia^[13] is said to have the figures of the Seven and below them semicircular stations from which Cumont supposes that the priest invoked the planet of the day. But the figures are not in week-order. A basrelief undoubtedly Mithraean found in Bologna^[14] does give them in week-sequence, but, if read in the ordinary way from left to right, they run Sun, Saturn, Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, Moon. This sculpture, therefore, to which Cumont does not assign a date, has the week-gods, but in an inverted order. Much the same appears in the one literary passage on which Cumont relies to prove week-knowledge in Mithraism. This is in Origen's famous refutation of the attack made on Christianity by an otherwise unknown person called Celsus^[15]. It is hardly necessary to say that we only know Celsus' treatise by what Origen says of it, and we cannot always be sure that he represents it fairly. But the passage in question seems to be a definite quotation and may be taken to represent justly at any rate what Celsus, a non-Mithraist, had been told about Mithraistic belief. According to this the pilgrimage of the human soul from a lower to a higher state was symbolized by a ladder composed of seven portals with an eighth at the top. These seven portals were represented by different metals each corresponding to a planet, and the order in which these came was Saturn, Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, Moon, Sun. Celsus, says Origen, 'to shew off his learning' added 'unnecessary' explanations of the order of the planets, and as one of the explanations is described as connected with the theory of music, we may fairly assume that it is the same as the first of Dion's two explanations. Here then, as in Bologna, we have the week-order reversed, but with the difference that, whereas that began with the Sun and ended with the Moon, here we begin with Saturn and end with the Sun. In the one case the week begins with Sunday and ends with Monday, in the other it begins with Saturday and ends with Sunday. Apart from this somewhat serious departure from the normal week, we have to remember that the date is late for our present purpose. It is true that though Origen is supposed to have written his treatise about A.D. 250, the book he is answering was not of recent origin, but it is not usually dated earlier than A.D. 180. We have thus no certainty that even if the slight and vague evidences just mentioned are to be connected with the week, they represent a time anterior to that at which we know it to have been in general use, when Mithraism, as I have said, with its prepossessions could hardly fail to adopt it. All we can say, then, is that as the week spread, it would find sympathy and support from Mithraism, which in this way may well have done something to swell the volume of popular feeling which propagated the new time-cycle.

As to the other 'mystery religions,' we may presume that they followed the popular current in conforming to week-observance. There is nothing in what we know of their creeds or the mentality of their devotees that would run counter to it. But I am not aware that there is anything positive to connect them with it. And the same, I think, though I would speak with all caution, may be said of that vast and vague body of belief and practice which we call magic. Magic and astrology went no doubt to a great extent hand in hand. For though originally and in logic they were opponents, since magic aims at a control of the destiny, which astrology declares to be beyond our control, in practice it was not so. The mind, which comes under the sense of this overwhelming power, will always be clutching at some method of propitiating or eluding it. It is not surprising, therefore, that we should find among the remains of magical documents occasional incantations to the planets, and that these should sometimes shew recognition of the planetary hours or days. These may very likely be much more numerous than those which I can give from my present knowledge. One of the volumes of those 'Codices Astrologorum' which I have already quoted contains a number of magic formulae of an astrological type^[16]. These direct the spell to be used when one or other of the planets is in a certain position in the Zodiac. But there is also appended a direction that it shall be used at the 'hour' of some planet, which is frequently a different one from that whose position is described. In these formulae the 'hour' of the planet may be assumed to mean the hour or hours in the planetary week which belong to the planet in question. No mention is made of days, and we have here an indication that, while to the popular mind the planet-days were the essential thing, the esoteric mind thought more of the hours which were the original unit of the system. Again, an Egyptian magical papyrus now in the Leyden Museum has side by side the normal and the week-order of the planets^[17] . The former is headed the 'Seven-Zones,' the other simply 'Greek,' a fact which, by the way, does not encourage us to think that in Egypt itself the week was regarded as Egyptian in origin. Some 'cursing' tablets also have been found in Rome, in which 'Mars' day' is recognized as unlucky^[18]. But in none of these cases does there appear to be any adequate^[19] reason for thinking that they belong to a date previous to the complete establishment of the week, and therefore all they shew, as in the case of Mithraism, is that when the planetary days or hours lay ready to hand, magic made use of them. Possibly better evidence may be or may already have been discovered and therefore, as I said, I speak with caution. But until such evidence is produced, the above is the best opinion we can form.

To the fact, then, that the planetary week established itself without official recognition, we have to add the probability that it established itself with little reference to any astrological body of doctrine, or to any existing religion, except indirectly to Judaism. The plain man who learnt to reckon time in these planetary terms did not, so far as we can tell, acknowledge any definite law of what to do or what not to do on each day of the week. And we have again to ask the question, what was the driving-force which led vast multitudes to adopt silently this time-cycle, which—let me once more reiterate this point—was new to them, whether it actually originated in recent or in prehistoric times. We cannot, I think, do more than say that it grew because the plain man believed vaguely but profoundly in the power of the planets. He rose on Friday and Saturday with the belief that these days were somehow under the influence, the one of the beneficent, the other of the maleficent star. He did not know what either could do for him, or what the astrologers said about them, but as other people remembered them, it was well for him to remember them also. And he was confirmed in this view by the belief that that remarkable, if objectionable, people, the Jews, appeared to attach immense importance to abstinence from activity on Saturn's day. This is the only answer I can give. I am not sure that it is a satisfactory one: at any rate it leaves me with a sense of some mystery surrounding the whole institution. One thing, however, is clear. The institution of the week remains to shew us, as nothing else in the history of the astrological movement does, how widely diffused and deeply rooted in the early Empire was the belief in the all-mastering power of the planets.

1. One would suppose that in Italy or Rome at any rate it must have required some strong influence to establish the planetary week of seven days against the Roman week of eight days. It must surely be difficult to keep two weeks going at the same time! I do not indeed know how much evidence there is of the observance of the nundinae after the first century or so. But market-days are always a persistent matter; moreover in the earlier times they regulated school holidays (v. Marquardt, loc. cit. p. 3). Superstition too attached to them. Augustus would take no journey on the day after the 'nundinae' (Suetonius, Aug. 92).
2. Suetonius, Aug. 94.
3. Odes, II, 17, 17–24. Cf. 'Babylonios,' numeros I, 11, 2.
4. Sat. VI, 553 ff.
5. Contra mathematicos, V.
6. De Civitate Dei, V.
7. I take this story from Bouché-Leclercq, L'Astrologie Grecque, pp. 514, 515. He gets it from a manual written by an astrologer named Palchus, which I have not seen. This manual, which apparently is more or less contemporary with the incident described, has been edited by Cumont (v. Bouché-Leclercq, p. xiv). I should add that Palchus found another flaw in the calculation of the astrologers, which does not concern our subject.
8. Cat. Cod. Astr. Graec. VII, pp. 88 ff.
9. γυναικώδης μαλακώδης.
10. Ecloga, 26.
11. I presume that Mr Wells found this statement in some respectable authority. But he did not get it from Cumont, who, after remarking that the Mithraists like the Christians specially observed Sunday (though he gives no evidence for it), goes on: 'Mithraism cannot have had any influence on Christianity in this, for the substitution of Sunday for the Sabbath dates from apostolic times.'
12. Textes et monuments figurés relatifs aux mystères de Mithra, I, pp. 119, 325, 339.
13. Texteset monuments figurés relatifs aux mystères de Mithra, I, p. 224.
14. Ib.
15. Origen, Contra Celsum, VI, 21. This passage is printed in full in Textes et monuments, II, p. 31.
16. III, pp. 40 ff.
17. V. Schürer, p. 24.
18. V. Schürer, p. 24.
19. Dieterich, who reproduces the Leyden papyrus in his Abraxas, thought that the contents pointed to a second century origin. But he admitted that the papyrus itself belonged to the third or fourth.