The serpent
The fifteenth lunar day is the crossing point of the month and the second of the four satanic days. The hours below are calculated for where you are.
- Runs from the fourteenth moonrise after the new Moon
- Satanic day
- Right now, lunar day
P. Globa, Avestan Lunar Calendar, and the short table that circulates from it. Tradition, not a measured effect.
What Globa says
A satanic day of the flesh, and the day the inner snake wakes up.
Almost every English page prints the serpent here, and that is the short table. Globa's book leads with the black jackal Anubis, the guide between worlds, because this day is the crossing from one half of the month to the other. The serpent is present in the book as the thing you fight, not the thing you are: the serpent-battle mystery, St George, the fight on the Kalinov bridge, the abduction of Proserpina into the underworld.
The instruction is unusual and specific. Defend justice, but take no pleasure in winning, and do not dodge the fight with excuses. The book compares it to Krishna instructing Arjuna before the battle with the Kauravas. Keep discipline, refuse suggestion, do not eat apples. And if you fall ill today the book says find someone who can pray for you, because you cannot do it for yourself.
- 01Fight, but do not enjoy itDefend justice, take no pleasure in winning, do not excuse your way out.
- 02No apples, no scissorsThe apple is barred outright, and one line bars every sharp instrument.
- 03Ask someone else to prayIllness today is the one thing the tradition says you cannot handle alone.
A quarrel today is the bad sign and a dog barking is the good one, and last night's dream is said to be prophetic for the whole month.
Where the sources disagree
Four author lines stand behind the lunar days and they are not one tradition. They run left to right in the order they were written, oldest first, and each one carries its date. This site names which line it is quoting every time.
Albertus Magnus
Medieval, before 1500
Neither bad nor good
The medieval line calls the fifteenth neither bad nor good. Illnesses are not dangerous, dreams are probable, and those born today are lovers of women.
The medieval lunary carried under his name. The attribution is traditional and not proven.
Sergei Vronsky
1915 to 1998
Neither fish nor meat, and brief bliss
Vronsky expands exactly that, in the Russian idiom: neither fish nor meat, not bad, not kind. Brief bliss that can turn into bitter disappointment, especially in love. Illness passes quickly without consequence, dreams almost always come true, and the child is often too amorous and may pay for it morally and materially.
Classical Astrology, volume 4. His text is the old lunary in modern prose, and carries no symbols.
Pavel Globa
Born 1953
Satanic day. The inner snake is awake.
The reading above is his. The thirty symbols, the satanic days, the stones and the omens all come from this line.
Avestan Lunar Calendar, and the school that follows it.
Alexander Zaraev
Born 1954
Friction early, results through others
Zaraev's first half is unfavourable, with friction at home and at work and a habit of offloading your own work onto other people. The second half is more successful, and he says you get things done through others.
His circulating texts carry no symbols and are pegged to the phase aspects instead.
The day Globa calls satanic is the day the medieval text calls neither bad nor good. Vronsky keeps the medieval verdict almost word for word, so the two can be printed side by side without changing a syllable.
A distinction Globa's own book makes and English pages lose
Satanic, and not the same as dark
Two different sets of difficult days get mixed into one.
The satanic days are the ninth, the fifteenth, the twenty third and the twenty ninth, and this is one of them. The days of Hecate are a different set: the dark days around the new Moon, when the Moon is not in the sky at all. English pages use the two names as if they meant the same thing. The book does not.
Set out in full on the sources page
How old is this
Old in part, and much younger than it is said to be.
Books of lunar days circulated in Europe from the twelfth century, and the Albertus and Vronsky lines sit in that tradition. The thirty symbols in their present form, and the satanic days, are a twentieth century Russian arrangement presented as ancient Persian. That claim is asserted and not documented.
Calculated in your browser, and true to the minute for the city at the top
How the day is counted
Lunar days are not equal, and they do not begin at midnight.
The first runs from the exact moment of the new Moon to the next moonrise where you are, and is usually short. Every day after that runs from one moonrise to the next, about twenty four hours and fifty minutes. A lunation holds twenty nine or thirty of them.
Because moonrise depends on where you stand, the lunar day is the one figure on this site that genuinely differs between two cities on the same evening.
The next four fifteenth lunar days
| Begins | Time | Ends | Time | Lasts |
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All thirty lunar days
The hours of this lunar day come from the new Moon and from the moonrises in the city named at the top, worked out in your browser with an open astronomy library.
The lunary attributed to Albertus Magnus; S. Vronsky, Classical Astrology, volume 4; P. Globa, Avestan Lunar Calendar; A. Zaraev. Every claim on this page carries the author it comes from.
None of the readings is a measured effect, and where the authors disagree this site says so rather than choosing for you.