Moon Reckoning
Second of thirty lunar days

The horn of plenty

Day two is an intake day, and the tradition reads it as the pattern-setter for everything the month will swallow. The exact hours for your location are set out below.

  • Runs from the first moonrise after the new Moon
  • Day of Hecate
  • Right now, lunar day
Ends
Lastsfrom moonrise to moonrise

P. Globa, Avestan Lunar Calendar, and the short table that circulates from it. Tradition, not a measured effect.

What Globa says

What you take in today is said to set the pattern for the month.

Globa's table names the symbol twice over: a horn of plenty and, in the same breath, a maw, a grasping mouth. The school treats the day as the moment to begin a course of physical exercise or a long block of study, and to practise generosity by actually giving something away. Anger is not discouraged here, it is forbidden outright.

The grasping mouth pulls Charybdis, Leviathan and the whale in behind it, which is why one English site prints Whale as the symbol and is not simply wrong. The practical layer is blunter. Pankratov tells you to drink a litre of salted water with lemon in the morning, sit still, and go through the foods you eat regularly one by one, reading nausea as the sign that a food does not belong in you. He applies the same test to friends.

  • 01Start the long thingA course of exercise or a block of study begun today is held to take root.
  • 02Give something awayGenerosity is the day's practice, and it is meant to be a real object.
  • 03No anger, none at allThe table forbids anger outright rather than merely advising against it.

Globa on people born today: they pull everything inward, it shows as greed in the undeveloped, and they eat anything without gaining weight.

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

Lucky for travel, conception and building

Lucky for travel by land and water, for conception, for building and for sowing. Thieves who work today are soon caught, and infants born today grow fast.

The medieval lunary carried under his name. The attribution is traditional and not proven.

Sergei Vronsky

1915 to 1998

Good for research, travel and conception

Vronsky keeps the mood and changes the subject: excellent for science, research and discovery, for conceiving a child, and for asking fate a favour, with journeys and moving house also favoured. Illness is short and harmless, dreams are false, and it is a bad day for thieves, who get caught.

Classical Astrology, volume 4. His text is the old lunary in modern prose, and carries no symbols.

Pavel Globa

Born 1953

An intake day. Learn, give, never rage.

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

Good first half, keep new ideas quiet

Zaraev splits the day. The first half is favourable and good for approaching superiors, but he says keep new ideas to yourself, because the second half can erase them.

His circulating texts carry no symbols and are pegged to the phase aspects instead.

Globa's day is about food and what enters the body. Vronsky's is about laboratories, journeys and asking fate for a favour. The two texts barely touch each other.

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 second lunar days

BeginsTimeEndsTimeLasts

All thirty lunar days

Calculated

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 readings

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.

The rule here

None of the readings is a measured effect, and where the authors disagree this site says so rather than choosing for you.