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The Study of the Planetary Week: History and Method

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The Study of the Planetary Week: History and Method

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The seven day planetary week and the grimoire tradition that preserves its magical uses share a documented, overlapping history, and Owen Davies' account of magic books across centuries and across the Christian, Jewish and Islamic worlds traces how manuscripts compiling planetary hour and planetary day correspondences circulated, were copied, translated and reworked by generations of scribes long before any single printed grimoire fixed a canonical version of the system.

That documented manuscript history matters for how an entry is written, because the planetary week and its associated hour system did not arrive in the medieval and early modern West as one settled text but as a body of continuously copied and adapted material, and Davies' history records where a given grimoire's own presentation of the week reflects a genuinely old transmitted core and where a later compiler's own addition entered the tradition.

An entry draws on this documented history of transmission for how the planetary week was preserved and reworked across manuscript traditions, keeping that history distinct from any single grimoire's own claimed antiquity, since a text's own claim to ancient origin is frequently, as Davies' history shows repeatedly, considerably younger than it presents itself as being.

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Sources
Grimoires: A History of Magic Books
Owen Davies, Oxford University Press, 2009View the Source
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