The crocodile
The twenty-third lunar day is the third satanic day, and the one with the most domestic instructions attached to it. Local times are below.
- Runs from the twenty second 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
The crocodile floats as a log and waits. A day for guarding the house.
The book gives the crocodile pretending to be a log while it waits for its next victim, and adds the Chimera, three heads of lion, goat and snake devouring everything alive, and Moloch. The instructions are housekeeping. Clean the house, sprinkle it with holy water, cleanse the thresholds with fire, fumigate with Labrador tea and cumin. Bake cheese pies and bake a nut inside one of them. Eat dairy. Do not cut hair or nails, do not have surgery, and do not spend the day sitting still.
The book calls the twenty-third a day of catastrophes and links it to hounding, persecution, exile and meeting an enraged crowd, and the short table calls it a bacchanalia of vampires. Then it tells you to bake a nut into a cheese pie. That collision, cosmic threat next to kitchen work, is the most characteristic thing about the satanic-day literature.
- 01Clean and smoke the houseWash it, fumigate with Labrador tea and cumin, cleanse the thresholds.
- 02Bake a nut into a pieCheese pies with a nut hidden in one of them is the day's named dish.
- 03No scissors and no surgeryHair, nails and operations wait, and so does sitting still all day.
One line says a couple who divorce on the twenty-third may end up remarrying each other later.
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 honour, empty dreams
Lucky for gaining honour. Illnesses are long but not dangerous, dreams are empty, and children born today are plain.
The medieval lunary carried under his name. The attribution is traditional and not proven.
Sergei Vronsky
1915 to 1998
Very good for finishing, bad for starting
Vronsky reverses Globa outright: very good for finishing things, and what comes to a head today can bring results, fame, prosperity and popularity. Start nothing new, it will be pointless. Illnesses are long but not dangerous, dreams are empty, and the child is not outwardly beautiful, so much depends on knowledge and kindness.
Classical Astrology, volume 4. His text is the old lunary in modern prose, and carries no symbols.
Pavel Globa
Born 1953
Satanic day. Guard the house.
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
Finish rather than start, and say less
Zaraev calls it dual and contradictory. Contracts and obligations get stress-tested and need rethinking, finishing beats starting, and in the second half ambition rises while patronage becomes doubtful, so he advises care about revealing plans.
His circulating texts carry no symbols and are pegged to the phase aspects instead.
Inside Globa's worst-day framing, Vronsky, Albertus and Zaraev all independently land on the same practical instruction: finish things today, start nothing. Three lines agreeing on what to do while disagreeing completely about the danger.
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 twenty third 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.