The Week and Its Days

After the day, the week—represented by the horizontal bars on most calendars—is among the most recognizable and commonly used parcels of time and also one of the most convenient. The week seems to have developed because it was simply a sensible way of dividing up the days of the month; and of all longer time periods, it is among the few that does not vary in length. Some biologists believe the week is selfdetermined. The 7-day biorhythm in the human body is one of the recent discoveries of modern chronobiology. It manifests itself in the form of small variations in blood pressure and heartbeat as well as response to infection and even organ transplant: for example, the probability of rejection of certain organs is now known to peak at weekly intervals following an implant.

We are not unique in broadcasting this beat: even simple organisms, down to bacteria and one-celled animals, seem to share it with

Us. There is, for example, a 7-day rhythm in the mermaid's wineglass, a species of algae whose configuration resembles a champagne glass with a long stem and a large flowery globe at the end. This organism can be entrained to reduce its rate of growth only when exposed to an alternating light-dark period of 7 days—no more, no less.

Does social time entrain biological time? We might be able to connect the faint ciica-septan, or 7-day, periods in our biological makeup to the week cycle upon which economically motivated human beings thrive. However, we know that the Romans, to whom we owe most of our temporal habits, worked on an 8-day cycle, the last day of which was a market day. Similarly, our word sahhath comes from the Jewish concept of the periodic recurrence of a day of abstention from work in the cycle—the seventh day—which the Jews gave over to the worship of the deity. So important was this round of the calendar that the most famous creation story in Genesis was built around the everyday structure of social time. The creation lasts 7 days—not 3 days or 6 months. Parallels between human origin and the cycle of social life experienced by ordinary people served to emphasize the hierarchical order depicted in the creation story. The week may not be a memorial of the creation of the world; instead, the creation is a mnemonic of the work week.

There are other reasons to think that this work-rest cycle of several days' duration is natural to the human condition. Most cultures with a developed system of trade and commerce employ a cycle something like it. Five-day market weeks are kept in parts of Africa and Central America. The Inca employed 8-day weeks, at the end of each of which the king changed wives. Villagers and field workers, having spent 8 days in their fields, would come to market on the ninth day. Short market weeks of 3 or 4 days were known among the Bantu of Angola in the last century,- then there are more lengthy artificial periods of time, like the 16-day market week of the Yoruba people of the coast of West Africa and the well-known 20-day week cycle employed throughout ancient Mesoamerica (which I will deal with in detail in chapter 6). The Kedangese of eastern Indonesia are the creative record setters when it comes to fabricating week cycles. They have ten kinds ranging in length from 1 to 10 days, each with its own set of names, all running at the same time. Furthermore, they seem to be able to calculate in their heads when every conceivable combination will recur in the maze of cycles that eternally preoccupies them.

Verses in the Enuma Elish seem to tie the week to the moon. After Marduk creates the "ornament of the night," he commands her "to make known the days" by going forth with a tiara:

At the beginning of the month, namely, of the rising the land.

Thou shalt shine with hours to make known 6 days.

(15-16)

On the seventh day "with half a tiara"; or, according to another translation, "On the 7th day halve thy disk.""* The implication seems to be that the 7-day cycle is a fair equivalent to a readily visible celestial phenomenon—when the moon passes from first visibility with its tiara-like crescent, to the familiar and well-defined "D-shape" quarter; then, though the Enuma Elish does not specifically state it, the next 7-day period might be associated with the time between quarter and full; and so on. The whole month of the phases is conveniently divisible into four quarterly periods in which the number 7 predominates. The British term fortnight, which stands for 2 weeks (14 nights), may have been a spinoff of this early relationship between the week and the month, an interval splitting the month into its pair of familiar halfcycles from new to full and from full to new moon. We cannot, however, be sure that the recognition of the period of the moon's phases came before the creation of the septenary cycle. (The moon's phase cycle is 29.5 days and not simply 4 times 7, so the fit is not as precise as we might like.)

If the moon does not lie at the foundation of the week, then perhaps the planets do. There is more than a hint of a planetary origin in the mere listing of the names of the days. The following table shows the Anglo-Saxon and English equivalents for each of the Latin named divinities in the day sequence:

Obvious in this list are the sun and the moon; less so, the match-up between Jove, whose Greek equivalent is Jupiter, and his Nordic counterpart, Thor. The planet Saturn appears in the list as well. In fact all celestial bodies that move regularly through the zodiac and were known before the invention of the telescope appear in the 7-day list, though arranged in an order that makes little sense to us: Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. Today we line up the planets in the order of their distance from the sun—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and so on—but that was not what mattered in Babylonian astronomy. And the Babylonians—indeed, everybody in the world before the Renaissance, as far as we know—did not conceive of the sun-centered system that gives rise to the modern way we in the West learn to list the planets. For them a more sensible order consisted of listing the celestial wanderers according to how fast they moved from one constellation of the zodiac to the next, from the slowest to the fastest: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, and Moon. In the more astrologically motivated astronomy of the past, each hour of the 24-hour day was thought to be presided over or ruled by a planet, the order of designation being given by consecutive runs through the 7-day list. A day received its name from the planet that presided over its first hour. Thus, the first hour of the first day was given over to Saturn, and that day was named Saturn's day. On that day Saturn also governed the 8th, the 15th, and the 22nd hours. Counting down the list, the 23rd hour of the first day would belong to Jupiter; the 24th and last to Mars. Therefore, the first hour of the next day would be enjoined to the sun, and the name of the second day of the week would be Sunday. Because 24 divided by 7 leaves a remainder of 3, to finish up the order of the day names in the Babylonian week cycle, all we need do is count off by 3s. Three positions forward from the sun lies the moon,- thus we have "moon-day" or Monday as the third in the week cycle. A count of 3 more takes us to Mars, whose day is the equivalent of Tuesday (Mardi Gras means "fat Tuesday"). Next in the list comes Mercury's day, Woden's day or Wednesday; then Jupiter (Thursday), and finally Friday, Venus being the equivalent of Frigg or Fria. The cycle is completed when we return to the first hour of the 8th day which, like the first day, turns out to be represented by Saturn. While Saturday was the first day of the week in the world of Exodus, upon their flight from Egypt the Jews made it the last day of the week—out of pure hatred, so it is said, of their oppressors.

While the weekday scheme seems to he of pre-hihlical origin and was used extensively throughout the Middle East, it was not formally introduced into our calendar until late in Roman times, not until the reign of the Christian emperor Theodosius late in the fourth century, though it had been initiated a few generations earlier by Constantine. Earlier the pagan Romans had been using an intricate backward counting scheme with a threefold unequal division of time that was unmistakably tied to the month.

The calends, from which we derive our word calendar, were the first days of the month, traditionally the time when religious leaders called people together to outline the festal and sacred days to be kept during that month. The ides fell at midmonth, usually the 13th or 15th day; and the nones, on the 9th day before the ides. The 4 to 6 days between calends and nones were named the "days before the nones." The 8 days between the nones and the ides were the "days before the ides." Finally, all the rest were the "days before the calends" and could be as many as 9. This backward way of counting time is similar to our reckoning time before the hour ("a quarter to six") or to the countdown before the launching of a space vehicle.

The scheme for naming the 7 days of the week, as outlined, grew no doubt out of the ancient practice of scientific astrology. The term scientific is appropriate here, for astronomers were required to predict precisely where the planets would be in order to prognosticate the course of human history. The influence of the planets on society was thought to be determined by where they lay among the stars, and the predictive power of a planet was tied directly to the "magnitude of its sphere." In other words, a planet's distance from the earth determined the size of its orbit around the earth, and that in turn was reflected in its speed. The slowest (Saturn) was thought to be farthest, and the farthest was considered the most powerful—a notion diametrically opposed to present knowledge, the power of gravity weakening dramatically with distance. So strong was this ancient astrological influence that 7 became a sort of magic number. The number of the planets served as the core of an associative principle that had significance for designating other entities: the metals (mercury is quicksilver); trees, plants, and animals (onions and donkeys belong to Saturn!); and, getting back to time, the supposed seven ages of man. In the scheme of the Greek astronomer Ptolemy of Alexandria (c. a d 150) the human time order is heaven bound, going from the lowest to the highest orbits. The period of infancy up to four years old was ruled by the moon; childhood, or ages four to fourteen, by Mercury; adolescence (fourteen to twenty-two) by Venus; youth (twenty-two to forty-one) belonged to the sun; full manhood (forty-one to fifty-six) to Mars; early old age, which lasted to sixty-eight years, was dominated by Jupiter; and whatever time was left belonged to Saturn. (A millennium and a half after Ptolemy laid down these seven ages, Shakespeare celebrated them in the well-known passage that heads this chapter.)

This associative way of thinking is, as I have said, an easy way to recall perceived patterns in the universe, a way of fitting patterns and events into a scheme or system covering all the mutual influences that might occur among them. If I assign an entity in a particular position in a list to one of a series of rotating states or qualities, then that entity automatically acquires a relationship to the quality; there is no need to look for a causal connection. I may say, for example, that just as I name the parts of my body from my head to my foot, so too may I name the stages of my life from birth to old age by passing along a continuum from top to bottom and by identifying each stage in one list with a segment or joint in the other. I can say that my head represents childhood and my foot old age. By arranging—in a single super list, table, or diagram—all the things and events that make up my universe of existence—elements, seasons, even the constellations of the zodiac—I can fashion a hierarchically ordered system whose core is the associative principle.* Often the properties will be found to oscillate between extremes in like manner as I pass down the continuum; that they are extremes may be a motive for their fitting together with each other in the first place. Thus, the seasons and the winds can be said to alternate like one's temperament or disposition, just as the good and evil properties of the planets balance one another out as we pass downward through their shell-like orbits from heaven to earth, Saturn being evil, Jupiter good. Mars evil, and so on.

•This is the principle embodied in the old nursery rhyme:

This is the way we wash our clothes,

Wash our clothes, wash our clothes,

This is the way we wash our clothes.

So early Monday morning.

This is the way we iron our clothes, etc.

So early Tuesday morning.

And so on through Wednesday (mending), Thursday (scrubbing the floor), Friday (sweeping the house), Saturday (baking bread), and Sunday (going to church).

In some cultures of the Amazon, the tapping of a woodpecker's beak upon an infected tooth is said to alleviate the pain. Of this association the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss has remarked:

The real question is not whether the touch of a woodpecker's beak does in fact cure toothache. It is rather whether there is a point of view from which a woodpecker's beak and a man's tooth can be seen as "going together" (the use of this congru-ity for therapeutic purposes being only one of its possible uses), and whether some initial order can be introduced into the universe by means of these groupings.®

Such order was achieved by most of our forebears, including the early Christians in their association of Christ with Sunday. They met on the sun's day because it was believed to be the first day in Genesis in which the creation of the world was concluded. It was also the day Christ, their savior, rose from the dead. Thus, Christ, like the sun, became the light of the world.®