The spider
The nineteenth lunar day is the hardest day in the oldest texts and one of the better ones in the newest. Your exact hours are below.
- Runs from the eighteenth moonrise after the new Moon
- 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 new idea today may be a net rather than an opening.
The short table gives a spider, and the book adds the net and Hercules, with the spider possibly a venomous tarantula. The instruction is to treat new ideas and new influences as a possible devil's net. The day's work is repentance, and getting rid of pride, lies, illusions and other people's thoughts. The two practices named are concrete: sit by a campfire, or walk around your own house with a candle. Only high moral qualities, dedication and modesty are said to reduce the day's negativity.
An error is worth naming here. One large English site labels the nineteenth a satanic day. Globa lists four satanic days, the ninth, the fifteenth, the twenty-third and the twenty-ninth, and the nineteenth is not among them. The same site is the richest source of variant symbols, which is exactly why it has to be checked rather than copied.
- 01Distrust the new ideaTreat a new influence as a net until it proves otherwise.
- 02Carry a candle round the houseWalking your own walls with a candle is the day's named practice.
- 03Do not repay debts todayOne line specifically holds the nineteenth back from settling money.
Stay home and keep away from drunk people is a line that survives word for word from the medieval text into a 2004 textbook.
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
Dangerous, stay at home
Dangerous. Do not travel, do not go near drunk people, better to sit at home. Illnesses are not dangerous, dreams soon come true, and children born today are neither wicked nor rogues.
The medieval lunary carried under his name. The attribution is traditional and not proven.
Sergei Vronsky
1915 to 1998
Very unlucky, stay home
Vronsky calls it very unlucky and even dangerous. Stay home if you can, do not marry and do not even divorce, and beware of people who are drunk or on drugs, who he says can maim you. The child grows up normally, illness is not dangerous and passes soon, and dreams may come true.
Classical Astrology, volume 4. His text is the old lunary in modern prose, and carries no symbols.
Pavel Globa
Born 1953
Difficult. Check what you are offered.
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
Ask for the raise in the first half
Zaraev goes the other way for half of it. His first half is favourable: patience and hard work win a superior's patronage and richer partners' money, personal magnetism rises, and he calls it a good day to ask for a raise. The second half turns, and he warns that treachery today can cause trouble on the following lunar day.
His circulating texts carry no symbols and are pegged to the phase aspects instead.
The medieval text and Vronsky both say stay at home and avoid drunks. Zaraev says walk into your boss's office in the first half of the day and ask for more money.
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 nineteenth 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.