Seven...the number seven. This number holds a peculiar fascination for people around
the world, especially in the West. Many consider seven to be a lucky number,
some even think of it as a divine number. We make lists of seven: the seven wonders
of the ancient world, the seven deadly sins, the seven virtues and seven vices...
but why seven? I'm sure you could come up with three more amazing ancient
achievements and have a list of the ten wonders of the ancient world, or you
could think of a few more examples of human wickedness and have nine deadly
sins, so why do we settle on lists of seven things? Seven is deeply embedded
into a conceptual structure nearly every human on the planet is familiar with: the
seven-day week. But why would we have invented such an odd manner of measuring
time? You may assume that it was enshrined in the creation story in the
book of Genesis in the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible: God creates the world in
six days and then rests on the seventh, establishing our week. But surprising to
many, the ancient Hebrews were not the first to follow a seven-day week nor
were they the creators of it. It was actually the ancient Babylonians who
invented the week as we know it now. It was adopted by the Hebrews during the
period of Babylonian captivity when a portion of the Hebrew population was
deported back to Babylon after the conquest of Jerusalem. It was during this
time in the sixth century BCE that the oral traditions of ancient Judaism
became the written text of the Hebrew Bible. And writing outside the walls of
Babylon, many elements of the Conqueror's culture found their way into the jewish
writings, like elements of the flood story and bits of Babylonian law codes
And the seven-day week traveled those same routes into the bible and
eventually into Western, now global, civilization.
But why? Why would any ancient culture decide that seven days is a logical or
desirable structure with which to measure the passage of time? It isn't
mathematically convenient: it doesn't divide evenly into the number of days of
a month or a year, which is why your birthday is on a different day of the
week every year. It doesn't correspond to the number of fingers we have which gave
us our base 10 counting system--wouldn't it make more sense to have a 10-day week
or better yet a five-day...week we can count it on one hand we get to the
weekend sooner! But no, we have seven days. There must have been some really
compelling reason the ancient Babylonians decided that this was a good
thing. So, forget what you think you know about the creation of the world in seven
days and think about the question fresh: Why would any ancient civilization create
this structure? How does it make sense? The other ways of measuring large spans
of time are obvious and they're built into the universe around us. We measure
days: the passing of a cycle of light and darkness--we now know it is the time of
one revolution of the planet we are on. We measure months--"moonths" really: it is the
rough measure of one cycle of the phases of the Moon, which is actually 29.53
days long, hence the need to kajigger the number of days in a month to keep it
in sync. And we measure years: a cycle of the seasons, which are now realized is
due to the tilt of the Earth's axis as it rotates in orbit around the Sun. So,
days, months, and years measure terrestrial, lunar, and solar cycles. They
are built into the world around us. It is obvious that we would get into the habit
of tracking time in this way; but what about the seven-day week? What
is there built into the universe that would suggest the importance of the
number seven? What are there only seven OF?
Seven continents? The ancients didn't
know about the Americas, Australia, or Antarctica. And is Europe really its own
continent? It just seems like the Western butt-end of Eurasia on a map. And besides,
medieval scholars drew maps that featured three continents, called T-O
maps, for the shape that they assumed, which delineated Europe, Asia, and Africa,
and so that doesn't work at all as an explanation.
Seven seas? Well there's really a lot more than seven seas. That is another of
those conventions of lists of seven people make, "to sail the seven seas..." If
you've studied music you may know that there are seven tones in ancient Greek
musical scales or modes as they called them. Today, we still count
A-B-C-D-E-F-G on a piano. There's no key of H. After seven letters we start over at the
next octave. But that is just as artificial an intervention as the seven-day
week. You can divide the continuum of pitch in a musical scale in as many
places as you like; in fact, modern music theory actually recognizes a division
into twelve tones, once you count the five semitones: the Black Keys on the
piano in each octave. When you listen to non-western music--the music of India,
China or Japan--it sounds strange to our ears because it is built on different
musical division of tones. That's why you can't play traditional Chinese music on
a piano or a guitar. You must use their musical instruments designed to play the musical
structures of their system. But interestingly, it turns out that the
Western preference for a seven-tone scale is due to the very same reason we have a
preference for a seven-day week. So, seven...WHAT? it is less obvious than the reasons
for days, months, and years; but it is something one can notice if one is very
patient and has begun the systematic study of the world around them and
spends a lot of time looking. upward, mostly at night. If you live in a big
city like I do then on a clear night you look up and see several dozen stars; but
the ancients, living before modern light pollution, saw thousands of stars--a whole
canopy of celestial lights shimmering overhead.
And among those thousands of lights the earliest stargazers in Babylon noticed
that a few of them were special. They weren't necessarily brighter than the
others and they weren't part of significant constellations--in fact, the
thing that made certain celestial lights different was that they wandered across
the backdrop of stars and each night were found in a different location as
measured against the "fixed stars." All of the other lights--the stars--kept their
same relative position as they moved in unison across the sky: the stars of the
Big Dipper are always in the same position...they never rearrange into
something else. And we can count on those three stars of Orion's belt to always be
in the same configuration. But certain lights were "wanderers"--they were not
attached to the stars behind them nor were they attached to each other nor
were they in geosynchronous orbit around the earth. These were the visible planets--
a word which in greek means "wanderer." And how many planets can you see without a
telescope?--well, only five actually: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn
are all visible to the naked eye; but add the Sun and the moon, two big lights
that also have their own unique paths across the sky, and that makes seven.
Today we differentiate between the planets, the moon (Earth's satellite), and the
Sun (the star we all revolve around), but for the ancients these were all planets:
the wandering lights in the sky. The Babylonians were some of the world's
first great astronomers and they may have been the very first to discover
that there were seven special lights in the sky existing between the earth and
the distant stars, wandering independently on their own unique paths
as if under their own intelligent direction. These were the seven heavenly
bodies and if you lived in the ancient world, a world saturated by myth and
mysticism even as science and mathematics were emerging, then what
would you assume these special intelligent lights were? They must be
gods! The Babylonian astronomers who were themselves priests, as most ancient
educated stargazers were, decided that there were seven major deities looking
down upon them and such gods required worship. It was
they who invented the system of having a special day of worship devoted to each
of these seven gods and after all seven had been appropriately venerated to
start the cycle over again: the seven-day week was born, which
because of its adoption by the Hebrews would eventually find its way into all
of Western civilization. There is no evidence that the pre-conquest Hebrews
followed a seven-day week or even had a creation story featuring seven days, and
why would they? Until one becomes devoted to astronomy there is no reason to
believe that the number seven is special. The ancient Hebrews were shepherds and
warriors but not astronomers. In all of the Old Testament only one planet is
mentioned: Venus, and it is called the "Morningstar" by people who had not yet
discovered the difference between stars and planets. Meanwhile, around the time
that the Hebrews in exile were finalizing the written Bible, the Greek
philosopher and mystic, Pythagoras (you all memorized a famous theorem with his
name attached to it) who is an avid researcher into mathematics, music, and
astronomy, was noticing the same thing about the planets as the Babylonians had.
In fact, it was Pythagoras who coined the term "planets" to describe them. He was
also the first of the Greek philosophers to teach that the world is round,
something educated people in the West have known ever since, so forget about
that myth of Columbus thinking he might sail off the edge of the world. Columbus
had gone to school and knew what every schoolboy of ancient and medieval times
knew: the world was round. Anyway, Pythagoras did not think of the planets
as literally gods but rather as "divine intelligences" that structured the
universe with geometrical harmony and beauty; and being as devoted to the study
of music as he was astronomy, it was Pythagoras who divided the scale into
those seven tones--one for each heavenly body--and believed that if one could fly
up to the heavens one would hear a celestial symphony
each planet sounding one of the tones of the musical scale: The Harmony of the Spheres," an aesthetic notion that would also have a long history in Western arts.
Once the idea of seven became commonly accepted as a number of divinity, all
sorts of applications emerged in literature and in belief systems. All of
those lists of seven began to emerge and in much ancient literature one
encounters the number seven showing up for no particularly compelling reason
other than that it is a special number. In the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh. the
wild man Enkidu is brought into civilization after having recreational
sex with a harlot for seven nights, after which he drinks seven goblets of
beer. leading him to realize how attractive city life might be. In the
Babylonian version of the flood story the flood hero Utnapishtim
builds a boat with seven decks and it rains for seven days--the whole story
takes place in multiples of seven. Whenever you find seven showing up like
this in the literature of antiquity it is always an indicator that the culture
has developed astronomy and taken notice of the seven heavenly bodies. Still today
the names of those seven days in the week are attached to the planets which
inspired them. The Babylonians used the names of their own gods as did the
Greeks, but we've inherited names that derive from the Roman version of these
ancient deities. Not all will be familiar to English speakers, but for those who
know a Romance language like Spanish or French, the languages descended from the
Roman language of Latin, then the names of the days of the week still reflect
the names of the planets. We have the day of the Sun, or Sunday, which most Romance
languages render as the day one goes to church and prays to the Lord, the "Dominus"
in Latin, hence Domingo in Spanish and Dimanche in
French. The moon or moon day, Monday in English, and the lunar day Lunes in
Spanish and Lundi in French. Tuesday is the day of Mars...we'll have to leave
English for a bit, but it is still recognizably Martes in Spanish and
Mardi in French. The day of Mercury which gives us Miércoles in Spanish and
Mercredi in French. The day of Jupiter, who is also called Jove, which gives us Jueves
in Spanish and Jeudi in French. The day of Venus which gives us Viernes in
Spanish and Vendredi in French. Then finally the day of Saturn, Saturday
in English, but Sabado in Spanish and Samedi in French, which refer to the fact
that Saturday is the original day of the Sabbath in the Old Testament. We still
call the names of the days of the week by the ancient pagan deities associated
with the planets as they were known to Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans.
As for the four days during the week that in English no longer match the Roman
planetary gods, this is because of the process of syncretism or religious
blending that occurred as Christianity moved north from the ancient
Mediterranean into the medieval north of Europe. The new religion couldn't just
eradicate all the local customs and religious cults at once--conversion
happens by slow integration of local elements into the new dominant religious
culture. And when similar gods were found to be worshipped by the locals as the
ancient roman pagans had had, that was a place where blending could happen.
Thus, the day of Mars, the God of War, was replaced with the name of a Germanic war god
named "Tyr"...The day of Mercury. the god most know as the messenger of Zeus, but
was also a venerated deity of cleverness and quick wits in his own right,
found a parallel in the wise Norse god Odin or Wodin or Wotan.
Jupiter, Zeus to the Greeks, whose weapon of choice was the lightning bolt, found an easy
parallel in Thor the God of Thunder. And while the Romans had a fertility goddess
named Venus, Aphrodite to the Greeks, the Northern Europeans had a fertility goddess in Frigg or Freya.
Thus today, English, which is a Germanic language in origin, has a "Tyr's day," "Wotan's day," "Thor's day," and "Freya's day"...
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
You'll find similar names in German, although at some point the name of Wotin's day was eliminated.
probably an attempt to lessen the influence of the All-Father in the
minds of newly converted Germanic tribesmen, and today is merely known as midwoch: midweek.
And one curious final bit: in the early Middle Ages there was a Christian Bishop
who thought that calling the days of the week after pagan gods was just too, well,
PAGAN! And he started a movement to change all the name days and merely number them.
His sphere of influence corresponded to modern day Portugal and thus in the
Portuguese language none of the days have names but are
called Domingo, still the day of the Lord, followed by segundal, Terca, Quarta and so
on, merely numbered until Saturday once again
Sabado, the Sabbath. There's one final wrinkle to all this: how did the days of
the week get each planetary deity assigned and why are they in a different
order than the ancients understood the planets to be? By ancient reckoning when
you look into the sky and assume the earth that you are standing on is the
center of everything then the order of the planets appears to be thus: Earth,
followed by the moon, obviously the closest thing to us, then
Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. It is actually pretty darn
impressive that ancient stargazers without the benefit of a telescope or
modern computer simulations figured out the order of the planets as accurately
as they did just transpose the Earth and the Sun carrying our moon along with it
and everything is in the correct order as we understand it in a modern
heliocentric system. But this order is not the order of the names assigned to
the days of the week and this is because the Romans, who adopted not only this
Babylonian/Greek system but also a solar calendar and a 24-hour day from the
Egyptians, blended the two systems together in the Julian calendar giving
not only a day of worship devoted to each planetary deity but also each hour
of each day to one with the order repeating after seven hours had passed.
Thus for example the day of Sunday would begin with the hour of the Sun followed
by the day of the Sun the hour of the moon etc the twenty-four hours of the
subdivided into seven three times with three left over then the next planet in
the system becomes the venerated body of the first hour of the next day which in
this case would be the hour of the moon which then gives its name to the whole
day. While seven doesn't divide evenly into
too many things it does work out here: as you go through the pattern of the
planets three times. then three more steps. then landing on the next day you
get through all seven planets in seven days and the entire system starts over.
Thus did the order of the order of the planets as understood by ancient geocentric
astronomy get rearranged into the order we still see reflected in the names of
the days of the week. And there you have it:
woven into your everyday life are the names of pagan deities in a very ancient
Babylonian tradition, equal parts mythology and astronomy, mathematics and
mysticism, filtered through the triumphant Romans with some Egyptian borrowings and
bequeathed in various forms to Western civilization...and resonating through it
all is the mystical reverence for the number 7 --our special lucky number--which
most people have positive feelings for although most have no idea why.
Look around your world and when you find mystical references to seven remember
the ancient Babylonian stargazers whose scientific mythological musings some
4000 years ago still shape your world.