Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [46]
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 bloodred 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 all 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