Days of the Week and Our Astrological Heritage: How the Days of the Week Were Named After Mythology

In the ancient world, the sky and beyond was seen as the physical realm of the gods. The great and divine spheres orbited our earth, the center of the universe. Astrology placed supernatural value on these great planets, and the tradition is passed on today.

In the geocentric world, astrologers named seven heavenly bodies that orbited our planet. They were named in order of their distance from their Earth from nearest to the farthest as the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Most of these are the Latin names of the mythological gods. Moon is derived from Mona, the Nordic god of the moon, and Sun is derived from Sunne, the Nordic goddess of the sun.

Now, we owe more to the astrology and the geocentric ideas of the ancient world than most of us like to admit. Amazingly, most of the astrologer-given titles of the planets still linger in our seven day week. This correlation is most obvious in romance languages, which are the languages that evolved from the language framework of Latin.

In Spanish for example, the days of the week are lunes, martes, miércoles, jueves, viernes, sábado, and domingo.

Lunes inherits its name from that Latin word "luna", which means moon.

Astrology gave the second or third (depending on your culture) day of the week a name after the Roman god Mars, god of war. That would be martes in Spanish.

Miércoles derived its astrological name from the messenger god,Mercury.

The king of the gods, Jupiter, gave its name to jueves.

Astrologers named the day before the weekend after Venus, the goddess of love, or viernes in Spanish.

After viernes, the Spanish language changed directions in its naming of days. Sábado is the sixth day, which is actually named after the Hebrews' Sabbath. In English, we have Saturday, which is obviously after Saturn.

A similar mindset brings forth the final day of the week, domingo. This term comes from the Latin "dies dominicus", which refers to the birth and resurrection of Christ.

Now, these terms of Roman mythology not only appear in Spanish. The days of the week in French are lundi, mardi, mercredi, jeudi, vendredi, samedi, and dimanche. In Italian, the days of the week are lunedi, martedi, mercoledi, giovedi, venerdi, sabato, and domenica. It's obvious that these days have the same meanings as the Spanish days. The Astrological names still exist.

As I already mentioned about Saturn and Saturday, these names from astrology translate in English as well. Some of these are less obvious than the romance languages.

Monday inherits its name from the Nordic god of the Moon, Mona.

Like Mars was the Roman god of war, Tyr was the Nordic god of war, and his day is our Tuesday.

Wednesday evolved from Wodensday in Old English, which evolved from Odin's day. Odin was the Germanic king god. Where the romance languages named this day after the messenger god Mercury, the astrology of the Germanic tribes named Wednesday after the king of their gods Odin.

Thor, the Nordic god of thunder, gave its name to our Thursday.

Like Venus, the Roman goddess of love, the Nordic goddess of love and fertility, Freya, was given the day we commonly call Friday.

Where romance languages named the sixth day (or seventh day) after the Sabbath of the Hebrews, English kept with the astrology names. Our day of Saturn is Saturday.

I don't think I have to explain where Sunday got its meaning, but our term from sun came from Sunne, which is the Nordic goddess of the sun.

Notice that I mentioned that the astronomers labeled the planets in order of their distances from Earth as the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. However, our order of these names is totally different. Actually, it isn't.

The astronomers labeled the vertices of a regular Heptagon starting with the Moon, then Mercury, and so on in a clockwise fashion. Now, by drawing a regular, seven point star inside this Heptagon we have a new arrangement: the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, and the Sun. Interestingly, this is the order of our week days.

Astronomers also had a lot of belief in alchemy. The seven metals of antiquity were: silver, gold, tin, copper, mercury, iron, and lead. By drawing a star mapping from the Moon to Jupiter to the Sun to Mercury to Saturn to Mars and finally to Venus, these planets each were dubbed one of the metals respectively as silver, tin, gold, mercury, lead, iron, and finally copper.

The amazing thing about the astronomical metals is that this labeling labels these metals in ascending order to their atomic numbers: iron 26, copper 29, silver 49, tin 50, gold 79, mercury 80, and lead 82.

Most of us don't use astronomy today. Even less of us use alchemy. I'm just guessing about that, though. I bet that almost each one of us uses these common names of our days of the week. We should thank our Germanic ancestors and our Roman neighbors for the interesting history wrapped in even our days of the week.

Remember: Thank God its Freya's Day (or Venus' Day).

SOURCES:
http://www.loggia.com/myth/saturn.html
http://www.evolvingdoor.ca/miscarticles/venus_mythology.htm
http://www.utahskies.org/solarsystem/planets/jupiter/mythology.html
http://www.crystalinks.com/mercury.html
http://www.aeonjournal.com/mars.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selene
http://www.indepthinfo.com/weekdays/index.shtml
http://www.gracecentered.com/center_of_the_universe.htm
http://www.crowl.org/Lawrence/time/days.html
http://www.webelements.com/