Pale Blue Dot ( PDFDrive.com ) (1)

had minds of their own.
Sharing the odd apparent motion of these planets were the Sun and Moon, making seven wandering
bodies in all. These seven were important to the ancients, and they named them after gods not any old
gods, but the main gods, the chief gods, the ones who tell other gods (and mortals) what to do. One of
the planets, bright and slow-moving, was named by the Babylonians after Marduk, by the Norse after
Odin, by the Greeks after Zeus, and by the Romans after Jupiter, in each case the king of the gods. The
faint, fast-moving one that was never far from the Sun the Romans named Mercury, after the
messenger of the gods; the most brilliant of them was named Venus, after the goddess of love and
beauty; the blood red one Mars, after the god of war; and the most sluggish of the bunch Saturn, after
the god of time. These metaphors and allusions were the best our ancestors could do: They possessed
no scientific instruments beyond the naked eye, they were confined to the Earth, and they had no idea
that it, too, is a planet.[‡‡‡]
When it got to be time to design the week—a period of time, unlike the day, month, and year, with
no intrinsic astronomical significance—it was assigned seven days, each named after one of the seven
anomalous lights in the night sky. We can readily make out the remnants of this convention. In English,
Saturday is Saturn's day. Sunday and Mo[o]nday are clear enough. Tuesday through Friday are named
after the gods of the Saxon and kindred Teutonic invaders of Celtic/Roman Britain: Wednesday, for
example, is Odin's (or Wodin's) day, which would be more apparent if we pronounced it as it's
spelled, "Wedn's Day"; Thursday is Thor's day; Friday is the day of Freya, goddess of love. The last
day of the week stayed Roman, the rest of it became German.
In all Romance languages, such as French, Spanish, and Italian, the connection is still more
obvious, because they 4 derive from ancient Latin, in which the days of the week were named (in
order, beginning with Sunday) after the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn.
(The Sun's day became the Lord's day.) They could have named the days in order of the brightness of
the corresponding astronomical bodies—the Sun, the Moon, Venus, Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, Mercury
(and thus Sunday, Monday, Friday, Thursday, Tuesday, Saturday, Wednesday)—but they did not. If
the days of the week in Romance languages had been ordered by distance from the Sun, the sequence
would be Sunday, Wednesday, Friday, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. No one knew the order
of the planets, though, back when we were naming planets, gods, and days of the week. The ordering
of the days of the week seems arbitrary, although perhaps it does acknowledge the primacy of the Sun.
This collection of seven gods, seven days, and seven worlds the Sun, the Moon, and the five
wandering planets entered the perceptions of people everywhere. The number seven began to acquire
supernatural connotations. There were seven "heavens," the transparent spherical shells, centered on
the Earth, that were imagined to make these worlds move. The outermost—the seventh heaven—is
where the "fixed" stars were imagined to reside. There are Seven Days of Creation (if we include
God's day of rest), seven orifices to the head, seven virtues, seven deadly sins, seven evil demons in
Sumerian myth. seven vowels in the Greek alphabet (each affiliated with a planetary god), Seven
Governors of Destiny according to the Hermetists, Seven Great Books of Manichaeism, Seven
Sacraments, Seven Sages of Ancient Greece, and seven alchemical "bodies" (gold, silver, iron,
mercury, lead, tin, and copper—gold still associated with the Sun, silver with the Moon, iron with
Mars, etc.). The seventh son of a seventh son is endowed with supernatural powers. Seven is a
"lucky" number. In the New Testament's Book of Revelations, seven seals on a scroll are opened,