The golden swan
The thirtieth lunar day does not happen every month, and when it does it can be very short. The panel below says whether it exists this time and for how long where you are.
- Runs from the twenty ninth moonrise after the new Moon
- Day of Hecate
- 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 closing day: forgive, settle up, and step into the next cycle.
The short list gives a golden swan and the book puts it on a purple lake. The day is for finishing things and returning debts, for giving people joy, for cleaning the house and bringing in a talisman, a horseshoe in particular. Nothing coarse should be eaten. Pankratov adds that medicinal plants gathered today are at their strongest, and one line suggests writing your grudges on paper and burning them.
The thirtieth is structurally unusual. It runs from the last moonrise before the new Moon to the new Moon itself, so it can be extremely short or absent altogether, which means the famous thirty-symbol list is really twenty-nine symbols and a conditional one. It is also a day of Hecate in the book's dark-moon sense, and the book says that when a month has no thirtieth day, the next month's satanic days hit at full strength.
- 01Return what you oweDebts and unfinished business close here, or carry over.
- 02Clean, and bring a talisman inThe house gets cleaned and a horseshoe is the named object.
- 03Burn the grudge listWriting grudges down and burning them is the suggested ending.
A dog barking today is read as a warning about a mistake made during the past month, the same animal that was the good omen on the fifteenth.
Named openly, because a gap is more useful than filler
Where the sources are thin
This is one of the five days the older lines barely cover.
Day 30 is short in every source. Vronsky's volume 4 gives no general verdict for it, the English translation adds a line that is not in the Russian, and the day itself does not occur in every lunar month.
This page stays short rather than filling the gap. Inventing is the thing this site exists not to do.
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, and the sick get up
Lucky for all undertakings. Dreams soon bring joy and the sick soon get up.
The medieval lunary carried under his name. The attribution is traditional and not proven.
Sergei Vronsky
1915 to 1998
No general verdict in volume 4
Vronsky gives no general verdict for the thirtieth in volume 4. He says only that the child may have physical defects or mental limitations and will need long serious attention, that the sick either recover quickly or can be saved only by immediate emergency help, and that dreams come true and bring great joy. The opening line about new ventures that appears in the English translation is not in the 2004 volume.
Classical Astrology, volume 4. His text is the old lunary in modern prose, and carries no symbols.
Pavel Globa
Born 1953
Settle up and forgive. Then it is over.
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
Close the old, then intuition rises
Zaraev's first half still carries the twenty-ninth and is a time to draw a line under old plans and relationships, bad for new partners and good for old ones and for relatives. His second half is favourable, with intuition and creative potential rising and thoughts and dreams that may be prophetic.
His circulating texts carry no symbols and are pegged to the phase aspects instead.
There is less to disagree about here than anywhere, because Vronsky's volume 4 gives no verdict at all. The English translation of him opens with a line about new ventures that the Russian book does not contain, and this site does not print that line as Vronsky.
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 thirtieth 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.