The elephant
The twenty-second lunar day is about knowledge that arrives rather than knowledge you work for. The exact hours for your location are below.
- Runs from the twenty first 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
Hidden knowledge arrives as revelation rather than as study.
The short list gives an elephant. The book names it: the white elephant Ganesha, and beside it a small golden key that opens the door of hidden knowledge. The day is for studying a science or a craft, for teaching, for passing on experience, and for finding out about your own roots. Generosity is part of it and conservatism is the failing. One instruction is unusual for this calendar: eat a lot, because the day wants the stomach loaded.
Nina Strelkova adds a book, a scroll and tarot cards to the cluster, and one line permits divination today while barring playing cards specifically. The body part attached to the day is the lower spine and the pelvis, which is where the popular layer gets its warning not to strain your back and not to travel.
- 01Teach somebody somethingPassing on a craft or an experience is the day's main instruction.
- 02Eat a large mealThis day wants the stomach loaded rather than emptied.
- 03Ask about your own rootsFinding out where you come from belongs to the twenty-second.
Divination is allowed today, and one line says do not so much as pick up playing cards.
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
Unlucky, but an excellent child
Unlucky, start nothing, and illnesses are dangerous. Dreams come true, and children born today are honest and gifted with every good quality.
The medieval lunary carried under his name. The attribution is traditional and not proven.
Sergei Vronsky
1915 to 1998
Unlucky, and dangerous for the sick
Vronsky calls it unfavourable, unlucky, even unhappy, especially for new ventures, and very dangerous for anyone who is ill. Dreams may come true, colour ones especially. The child, all the same, is gifted, honest and active and lives to deep old age.
Classical Astrology, volume 4. His text is the old lunary in modern prose, and carries no symbols.
Pavel Globa
Born 1953
Learn something, and feed the learner.
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
Favourable, and a good day to propose
Zaraev is with Globa here: spiritual and creative renewal, honest and altruistic partners, sharp intuition, and a good day to make a proposal and be told yes.
His circulating texts carry no symbols and are pegged to the phase aspects instead.
A clean two against two. Globa and Zaraev call the day favourable and good for asking; Albertus and Vronsky call it unlucky and say start nothing. The tell is the excellent child on an unlucky day, carried unchanged from the medieval text into the modern one.
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 twenty second 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.