A Note on Myth to Power by Brahmin and Spencer and The Days of the Week

The recent preview release of Myth to Power – the long-awaited book by Mark Brahmin and Richard Spencer – has already caused controversy. Seemingly minutes after it was published, it was subject to a pair of hostile reviews by Keith Woods and Ed Dutton, who then followed it up with more bashing in an interview together. The speed and ferocity of these attacks led some to speculate on whether it was a coordinated hit job, whether Woods or Dutton had even read the book, or, worse still, relied on AI. JF Gariépy was prepared to give the book more of a chance and then appeared on a podcast with Spencer to talk more about it. I am not ready to weigh in on this debate yet, because I have not finished the book. I will say that I would have preferred it to be a run-down of Brahmin’s and Spencer’s film review greatest hits because their Unconscious Cinema series remains a benchmark not only for their method, but also in dissident cultural critique more generally. Perhaps the planned volume 2 will be this? Myth to Power, however, is much more ambitious and attempts nothing less than to rewrite practically all of Western history through their JEM (‘Jewish Esoteric Moralization’) frame. This article cannot possibly begin to address any of that, instead I wish to concentrate on just one small section that caught my eye called ‘The Sinister Seven’. This touched on something I happen to have been interested in of late: the unlikely topic of the origin of the seven days of the week, their order and their names. I do not intend this article as a criticism of Brahmin and Spencer, rather I think this topic and what I will explain are quite interesting. In what follows, I will first show what Brahmin and Spencer say about the days of the week, then explain where I think they have gone wrong, and finish with some tentatively perennial universalist comments on the nature of the seven energies to which the days of the week point.

Brahmin and Spencer write the following:

Seven is the number of Saturn. This derives from classical astronomy and the seven wandering heavenly bodies visible to the naked eye: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and, finally, Saturn. These have given us the names of the days of the week, which, in English and other Germanic languages, have acquired the names of Norse deities. The day assigned to each Roman planet or god was given the name of his or her equivalent in Norse myth.

The French mardi and mercredi reference Mars and Mercury. The Modern English ‘Tuesday’ relates to Tyr, who is a Mars equivalent. Today, Germans use ‘Mittwoch’ for mid-week, this being a relatively recent substitute for ‘Wotanstag’ (wôdenesdach). The English Wednesday retains this, as does the Dutch woensdag. As mentioned, Tacitus reported that the Germanics worshiped Mercury as highest, and we see this with Odin’s placement on ‘Mercury-day.’ With Thursday or ‘Thor-day,’ we suspect the equivalent of Heracles or Vulcan had been elevated to a kingly, Jupiterian status to match the French jeudi.

Much of this is true with one small error: Njord was not given to Saturday. It remained ‘Saturn’s Day’ and no Norse god was attributed to it; in Old Norse they called it laugardagr (‘washing day’). Brahmin and Spencer do not explain why the days are in this order; I will get to this presently. Then, they ask some suggestive questions, which I happen to know the answers to:

The Romans had operated on an eight-day week for most of their history, a tradition they might have inherited from the Etruscans. Constantine, the first emperor to convert to Christianity, introduced the seven-day week in AD 321. This transition itself was an honoring of the Jewish god and is best understood as JEM. Christian worship traditionally occurs on the ‘Sun-day’ —a holdover from the Edict of Constantine, itself derived from sun worship. The seventh day will remain associated with Saturn and the Jews. Remarkably, the week itself—passing from an Solar Sunday to a Semitic and Saturnian Sabbath—seems to present the civilizational cycle in microcosm. Is it a stretch to imagine that this was developed consciously? Was it added to prepare the Aryan mind for the inevitability of the closing, sabbath, or decline ... or to inculcate an acceptance of things ‘invariably’ moving from the solar and Aryan to the Saturnian and Semitic?

What is true in Brahmin’s and Spencer’s account is that the Romans maintained an eight-day week and the Jews maintained a seven-day one. However, the Jewish seven-day week did not bear any names. They were simply called ‘day 1’ (yom rishon), ‘day 2’ (yom sheni) and so on, with the seventh day called Shabbat. In ancient Babylon, they had a lunar month, where the days were numbered from 1 to 28 similar to how we do it in the modern calendar. The Greeks added festival days to the lunar calendar, but still didn’t name the days after gods until about 120BC. The Roman calendar was organised around the coming of the marketplace on the eighth day, and they were simply lettered A to H. So where did the convention of naming the days after the planets (gods) come from? And why should it be in the order we see them? If you think about it, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn is a seemingly random order which has no relation to their positions in the sky or to their relative importance in the pantheon.

The answer to this is somewhat surprising and obscure. As Brahmin and Spencer say, the ordering of the days of the week ‘derives from classical astronomy and the seven wandering heavenly bodies visible to the naked eye’. More specifically, it derives from astrologers in Hellenistic Egypt in the second century BC — the same milieu that produced the horoscope and the zodiac. Those systems plot the seven wanderers against the fixed stars: the Sun and Moon, which move through the sky, and the five wandering stars (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn), which also change position. These last seven were taken together as the seven classical planets and were called ‘the wanderers’.

For our story, we have to go to Alexandria (the same ancient city from which Spencer and Brahmin take the name of their podcast) circa 120BC. It has to be mentioned that knowledge in these areas is never certain, since dating may be significantly out and as we are often dealing with fragmentary archaeological evidence, almost everything is disputed by someone somewhere – so don’t take my confidence for certainty, remember we are always talking about a rough ballpark, which is to say ‘Alexandria around this sort of time’. If you are interested, my explanation here is sourced ultimately from classical sources such as Vettius Valens and Cassius Dio, it is partly disputed by the modern scholars, Ilaria Bultrighini and Sacha Stern, who date the development of the seven-day week about 200 years later in Italy. This boils down to the fact that they found graffiti in Italy but can’t find any in Egypt or Greece. Make of that what you will, but Bultrighini and Stern are trying to overturn something that has been considered settled for about 2000 years – which means it would be on them to disprove the attribution to ancient Alexandria than vice versa.

Anyway, in this general period in Alexandria, the Greeks provided the elite high culture and language, while the majority population spoke Demotic Egyptian and maintained their own priests and temple practices to worship the old Egyptian gods – at this time the Isis cult was particularly prevalent. To complicate matters, there was a large Jewish population in this city who also would have had to know some Greek (for official reasons) and some Egyptian (just to live and get by in the city) but who maintained Hebrew for their own scripture and worship. Since this really matters for the analysis of Brahmin and Spencer, it seems likely that the astrologers in Alexandria were ethnically Greek and their work was written in Greek, but it is I suppose theoretically possible but unlikely that they were either ethnic Egyptians or ethnic Jews working in Greek. The attribution of the Greek gods to the planets long pre-dated this period and, before them, the Babylonians also attributed the wandering stars to the gods. To be clear, it seems that when the Greeks pointed to Jupiter in the sky, the planet was said to be Zeus himself: that is, the planet is the god, but it is less clear how literally this was believed.

These Alexandrian astrologers are thought to have established what is called the Chaldean order of the planets. The Greeks themselves seem to have attributed this order to the Babylonians possibly dating back to the second millennium BC, but this is shrouded in mystery and disputed by modern historians for whatever reason. The Greeks and Romans loosely used the term ‘Chaldean’ to refer to anything thought to derive from the astrology of ancient Babylon. In any case, the origin seems to be quite ancient and may well pre-date Alexandria in 120BC. This Chaldean order is established by how long it takes the stars to move through the sky from our point of view on earth. This order is as follows from longest (slowest) to shortest:

1. Saturn (about 28 years)

2. Jupiter (about 12 years)

3. Mars (2 years)

4. Sun (1 year)

5. Venus (stays near the Sun)

6. Mercury (stays near the Sun)

7. Moon (28 days)

The ancient astrologers then took these seven planets to devise a system whereby each hour of each day is ruled by one of them. The formula for devising the hours is not straightforward: the first hour of day starts when the sun rises, however the day does not end at sunset but at the start of the next day. The astrologers took the time between sunrise and sunset and divided it by 12, then the time between sunset and the next sunrise and divided that by 12. This means that the hours of each day were not a standard 60 minutes, but varied every day and night. The day hours in the summer are therefore longer than the night hours, and vice versa in the coldest and darkest nights of winter. Here is a table of all the hours taken from Wikipedia:

Now this is where it gets interesting. Studying this table reveals that the planetary hours must have preceded the convention of the naming and ordering of the days of the week. Notice that the ordering of the hours starting with Saturn ends on Mars (hour 24), which means the following hour is Sun, hence the next day is Sunday. Likewise, the final hour of Sunday is Mercury, which means the next hour is Moon, hence Monday, and so on. This table conclusively proves that the ordering of the days of the week can only have been derived from the planetary hours. Incidentally, the first recorded private Roman adoption of this week was in Pompeii circa 60AD. There is also speculative evidence that the Sabines, who seem to have worshipped Sol, used a seven-day week sometime between 19BC and 14AD – but, like everything else, this is disputed by some historian or other. It seems gradually to have been informally adopted by the Romans in ordinary speech in the second and third centuries AD and then formally passed into law in 321AD by Constantine. To be clear, Constantine did not declare ‘henceforth, the week is seven days,’ he simply made Sunday (dies Solis) a day of rest for the by-then mostly Christian population, the remaining pagans still worshipped Sol in any case. The seven-day week named after the gods had likely been used informally for at least a hundred years or two. As I mentioned, Rome’s ‘eight-day week’ was mainly a demarcation to say ‘the market comes to town every eight days’ and for a period the two systems may have even been used side-by-side. Constantine’s edict probably stopped the market ever falling on Sunday, because if it stuck to the eight-day cycle it would move forward one day every week in the seven-day week which would include Sundays.

All this causes quite a large issue for the Brahmin and Spencer thesis that all of this was done as some sort of Jewish demoralisation strategy. They are right that Saturn is central to the seven-day week, but not because its day happens to land on the Jewish Sabbath as they suppose, but rather because Saturn, as the slowest planet, was the first in the Chaldean order and therefore used to establish the first planetary hour of the first day from which we derive the entire week. For their claim to hold, they’d have to prove that the Greek-Egyptian astrologers who devised these planetary hours were either secretly Jewish or otherwise already subverted by them.

It does appear to be a coincidence that there were seven classical planets and that, as Brahmin and Spencer put it, seven is ‘the most sacred number in Judaism’. That said, the recurrence of this number across many traditions esoteric and otherwise may not be an accident. For example, the seven metals in classical alchemy were directly derived to be correspondences to the seven planets and indeed the seven god-energies they were said to represent. Where this gets more difficult is that, as I mentioned, Alexandria at this time had a large Jewish population who were known at least to have used the services of the astrologers and to have involved themselves in esoteric matters. For example, one of the first alchemists is said to be a woman called Maria Hebraea or ‘Mary the Jewess’. She lived about 200 years after the astrologers we have been discussing. She did not invent the attribution of seven metals to seven planets to seven gods, which is first mentioned in a commentary on Pindar written sometime in the Alexandrian intellectual milieu of this period but is thought to be much older. However, I think we would verge into David Icke sort of territory to suggest that the infusion of the number seven into the astrology and alchemy of Alexandria in 150BC was a Saturnine-Jewish plot.

To even entertain such a plot gives rise to more questions than it answers. For example, why would Jewish people seek to promote the Greek gods to greater symbolic significance rather than Yahweh? If Judaism is a Saturn cult as is often claimed, why would the alchemical inner journey go from Saturn’s metal (lead) to Sol’s metal (gold)? Using the logic of Brahmin and Spencer, alchemy seems to be an instance of ‘AIM’ (‘Aryan Inner Moralization’) not ‘JEM’. Whatever the case, it seems to me tremendously more likely that all this ultimately derives from the fact that the seven planets are those that can be seen with the naked eye. It may even be possible that the significance of seven to Judaism has this as a common root. Brahmin and Spencer write:

In the Book of Revelation, for instance, the number appears with an obsessive frequency. We find seven-headed beasts, a lamb representing Jesus with seven horns and seven eyes, seven spirits of God, seven speaking thunders, seven bowls full of the seven last plagues, seven golden bowls filled with the wrath of God, seven golden lamp stands (which are seven-branched menorahs), seven churches, seven seals, seven angels, seven trumpets and, finally, seven stars.

It stands to reason that Jewish people could see the same seven stars in Jerusalem as Greeks and Egyptians could in Alexandria. As I mentioned, the Greeks themselves claimed the Babylonians already had a system of attaching their gods to these seven stars possibly as far back as 1800BC.

In ancient Persia, the Zoroastrians dedicated the first seven days of the month to ‘the heptad’. They believed that Ohrmazd (the supreme creator aka God) made the world in seven material creations. At Nowruz, still celebrated by Iranians all over the world, at ‘haft sin’ a living table is set with seven things all beginning with the letter ‘s’. In Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, the hero Rostam must face seven trials. Ancient Persian geographers mapped the world into seven climes. The point here is not to say 1. That Judaism ripped off Zoroastrianism, or 2. That Ancient Persia had been subverted by ‘JEM’. Rather, it strikes me as a little facile to say that any particular group might lay claim to a number. It seems a universal phenomenon and the Occam’s Razor conclusion is that it probably derives from the visibility of the planets.

In fact, such is the recurrence of the significance of ‘seven’ across cultures, that those of a more perennialist mindset might be tempted to wonder if there might be something special about it after all and that each of these instances is simply a local manifestation of the same thing, Judaism included. It strikes me that the classical seven planetary gods point to primordial forces that can be observed in many different times and places under many different names. The relative ease with which Babylonian or Egyptian gods were swapped out for Greek gods, and then Roman ones, and then Norse ones seems instructive. Thoth, Hermes, Mercury and Odin aren’t quite the same god, but they at least gesture to the same Wednesday-shaped hole, much as Horus, Ares, Mars and Tyr do for Tuesday or Isis, Selene, Luna and Mani for Monday. Such is the power of these seven basic energies – Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn – that Judaism itself later absorbed some version of them in Kabbalah and its Tree of Life. Seven of the ten sephiroth are ciphers for the planets, while the other three represent, roughly, the divine source (Kether), the eternal mysteries (Chokmah) and Earth (Malkuth) itself. Sefer Yetzirah already assigns the seven double letters to the seven planets and, explicitly, to the seven days of the week. Centuries later, when the ten-sephirah Tree is drawn as a cosmology, seven of the ten stations receive the classical planets: Binah–Saturn, Chesed–Jupiter, Geburah–Mars, Tiphareth–Sun, Netzach–Venus, Hod–Mercury, Yesod–Moon. Interestingly, the old Judaic God ‘El’ is attributed to the Chesed-Jupiter sphere, which corresponds with Amun-Ra, Zeus and Thor – something about that thunderbolt sky father keeps recurring. We are a long way from Alexandria in 120BC by this point in history (Kabbalah was codified in the medieval era, circa 1286 AD), but nothing had changed the fact that the seven wanderers can be seen with the naked eye and that the seven archetypal energies they represent seem endlessly to recur in human affairs and in the imagination – Greek, Roman, Jewish, or otherwise. This universal fact seems more likely than trying to cast Kabbalah as a secret pagan sleeper cell or the days of the week as a secret Jewish demoralisation scheme. To come back to Brahmin and Spencer, could it not be possible that, despite Abrahamic efforts, the old gods just won’t go away?