Hour Lord

The fuller picture

The planetary hours are older and stranger than they sound, and the mechanics are worth having straight because almost everybody assumes they're clock hours. They aren't. Daylight is divided into twelve equal parts and the night into twelve more, so a summer day hour runs long and a winter one runs short, and the two sets are different lengths on the same date. The first hour of daylight on any day belongs to that day's own planet — the Sun on Sunday, the Moon on Monday, Mars on Tuesday and so on — and each following hour steps one place along the Chaldean order: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon, wrapping round. Twenty-four steps through a seven-planet cycle is what makes the next day's first hour land on the next day's ruler, which is where the order of the days of the week comes from.

The test has four accepted ways of passing, and the authority matters because the fourth is not Lilly's rule. Lilly accepts the same planet ruling the hour and the rising sign; the hour ruler being the sect-correct ruler of the rising sign's triplicity; or the hour ruler having the same complete hot-or-cold and dry-or-wet humour as the rising sign. Bonatti instead compares where the two rulers are placed: the hour ruler and the ruler of the ascendant must occupy signs of one triplicity. Deborah Houlding accepts any of those four conditions in practice, while keeping their sources distinct.

What's agreement actually worth? Less than its prominence suggests. It is confirmation — the chart nodding along — not permission to read. Houlding explains that many plainly sincere charts show no hour agreement, which is why she relaxes the test to Lilly's or Bonatti's conditions. Our worksheet gives it half the weight of an ordinary check, and the judgment records either presence or absence only as a minor note about the chart's fitness. Treat a match as reassurance and a mismatch as a note in the margin, never as a verdict or a refusal.

The hour does a second job that gets confused with the first, and this one isn't about radicality at all. The hour ruler can be read as testimony in its own right, describing the matter rather than validating the chart. In medical questions that's routine: a question asked in the hour of Saturn is bad news for the illness, the physician who first meets the patient in the hour of Jupiter or Venus will get on with them whether or not the treatment works, and a first meeting in the hour of Mars describes a patient who refuses treatment. In one event chart the hour of Saturn simply colours the whole event with delay and obstruction. So when someone tells you the hour matters, ask which of the two things they mean.

The implementation now has one shared answer. Lilly's triplicity branch uses the day or night ruler he gives for the rising element; the participating ruler does not pass it, and an unknown sect cannot be guessed as day. His humour branch compares the hour planet with the rising sign on both qualities, including Mercury's cold-and-dry inclination. Bonatti's placement branch still works when sect is unknown because it asks a different question about the signs occupied by the two rulers. This keeps a missing datum from becoming a fabricated pass while preserving every independently testable route.