The <em>Picatrix is a masterpiece, but it is an incomplete one. The Latin translation of the <em>Ghayat al-Hakim — produced in the court of Alfonso X of Castile around 1256 — gave Western esotericism its most influential single text on astrological magic. It introduced European readers to the concept of planetary hours, to the idea that specific windows of celestial time carry specific operative power. But the version that reached the West was a summary. A compression. And what was compressed most severely was the very system that the Arabic tradition considered the operational backbone of all magical timing: the complete planetary hour grid.

The full system — preserved in texts like the anonymous al-Jawahir al-Lamma’a, Ibn al-Hajj al-Tilmsani’s <em>Shams al-Anwar wa Kunuz al-Asrar, and al-Buni’s Shams al-Ma’arif — is not a vague set of correspondences. It is a master grid that maps every single one of the 168 hours in a week to a specific planet, a specific angel, and a specific jinn king, with detailed operational instructions for what can and cannot be accomplished in each. The Picatrix gestures at this system. The Arabic sources spell it out in full.

Here is what the Western transmission lost.

Planetary Hours Are Not Clock Hours

The first thing the Arabic sources clarify — and the first thing modern practitioners get wrong — is that planetary hours are not sixty-minute intervals. They are variable-length divisions of the day. The period from sunrise to sunset is divided into twelve equal parts, and the period from sunset to the following sunrise is divided into twelve more. Each of these twenty-four segments is one “planetary hour.”

This means that in summer, when daylight stretches long, a daytime planetary hour might last seventy-five or eighty minutes, while a nighttime hour contracts to forty-five or fifty. In winter the reverse occurs. The hours breathe with the seasons. They are tied to the actual movement of the sun across the sky, not to the mechanical ticking of a clock that did not exist when these texts were written.

The al-Jawahir al-Lamma’a is emphatic on this point. The practitioner must calculate the hours fresh each day, based on the actual time of sunrise and sunset at their location. Using fixed sixty-minute intervals — as nearly every modern planetary-hour calculator does — produces a grid that is offset from the true celestial timing, sometimes by an hour or more. You think you are operating in the hour of Jupiter. You are actually in the hour of Mars. The entire operation is misdirected from the start, and you will never know why it failed.

The 168-Hour Master Grid

The Chaldean order of the planets — Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon — forms the backbone of the system. The first hour after sunrise on any given day is ruled by the planet that governs that day. Sunday begins with the Sun. Monday with the Moon. Tuesday with Mars. And so on. Each subsequent hour advances one step through the Chaldean sequence.

The Arabic sources do not leave this as an abstract rule for the reader to work out. The al-Jawahir al-Lamma’a and the <em>Shams al-Anwar both present the complete grid — all 168 hours of the week — with the ruling planet of each hour explicitly named. The grid is a working reference table, designed to be consulted before any operation. It tells the practitioner not just which planet rules a given hour, but what kind of work that hour supports.

And here is where the system becomes genuinely surprising, even for readers who think they know their planetary correspondences: the ruling planet of a day does not make all hours of that day favorable. On Sunday — the day of the Sun — the second hour is ruled by Venus. The Arabic texts describe this specific hour as disastrous. Nothing should be undertaken during it. No talisman inscribed. No conjuration attempted. No significant decision made. The practitioner who assumes that “Sunday = Sun = good for solar work all day” has fundamentally misunderstood the system.

The grid is not a set of general guidelines. It is a schedule. Certain hours are windows. Certain hours are walls.

The Paired Hierarchy: Angels Above, Jinn Kings Below

The Picatrix mentions planetary spirits. The Arabic sources go further. Each of the seven planetary days is governed by a paired hierarchy: an angel who rules from above and a jinn king who rules from below. These are not interchangeable. They are two distinct chains of authority, operating simultaneously, one celestial and one terrestrial.

The pairings, as recorded in the al-Jawahir al-Lamma’a and corroborated across multiple manuscripts including the <em>Kitab al-Ajnas, are as follows:

  • Sunday (Sun): the angel Ruqiyail and the jinn king Al-Madhhab
  • Monday (Moon): the angel Jibrail and the jinn king Murrah Abu al-Harith
  • Tuesday (Mars): the angel Samsamail and the jinn king Abu Mihriz al-Ahmar
  • Wednesday (Mercury): the angel Mikail and the jinn king Barqan Abu al-’Aja’ib
  • Thursday (Jupiter): the angel Sarfiyail and the jinn king Shamhurish
  • Friday (Venus): the angel ’Anyail and the jinn king Zawba’ah
  • Saturday (Saturn): the angel Kasfiyail and the jinn king Maymun Aba Nukh

The operational significance is this: when working in a planetary hour, the practitioner addresses the angel for matters of divine permission and spiritual elevation, and the jinn king for matters of terrestrial execution. The angel opens the gate. The king carries out the task. Addressing only one — as most Western planetary magic does, working exclusively with “planetary spirits” without distinguishing the dual hierarchy — is like sending a letter with a return address but no delivery instructions.

What Each Planetary Hour Is For

The Arabic sources do not simply assign planets to hours and leave the practitioner to guess the application. Each planetary ruler carries a specific domain of operative action, and the texts are detailed about what should and should not be attempted during each:

  • Moon hours: matters of rulers, kings, and authorities. Recovering lost objects. Locating buried treasure. Travel by water. The Moon is the intermediary between the celestial and the mundane — its hours are for anything that requires moving between worlds or gaining the favor of those in power.
  • Mercury hours: scholarly pursuits, writing, and the construction of talismans. Mercury governs the intellect, and its hours are specifically designated for inscribing magical squares, preparing written charms, and any work that requires precision of language. The Shams al-Ma’arif places particular emphasis on Mercury hours for wafq construction — the numerical magic squares that are central to the Buni tradition.
  • Venus hours: attraction, love, reconciliation, and the cultivation of beauty. Venus hours are for bringing people together — whether in romantic love, in friendship, or in political alliance. The Shams al-Anwar warns that Venus workings attempted outside Venus hours are not merely weakened but actively dangerous, as the attractive force, improperly timed, can draw the wrong kind of attention.
  • Sun hours: awe, kingship, authority, and dominion. Sun hours are for workings that require the practitioner to project power — to command respect, to establish authority, to make oneself appear magnificent in the eyes of others. The al-Jawahir al-Lamma’a specifies that the Sun’s hours are uniquely suited for operations involving direct contact with royal or angelic entities.
  • Mars hours: destruction, separation, conflict, and the breaking of bonds. Mars hours are the hours of war. They are used for offensive magic — for creating enmity between enemies, for severing relationships, for operations that require force rather than persuasion. The texts are clear that Mars hours are dangerous and should be used only with extreme caution and clear intent.
  • Jupiter hours: wealth, livelihood, generosity, and expansion. Jupiter is the great benefic, and its hours are for anything that involves material increase — attracting prosperity, securing employment, expanding a business, gaining the patronage of the wealthy.
  • Saturn hours: binding, restriction, imprisonment, and endurance. Saturn hours are for operations that require something to be fixed in place — binding a jinn, restricting an enemy’s movement, creating wards that hold indefinitely. Saturn is slow, heavy, and implacable, and its hours share these qualities.

The Mandatory Accompaniments

Timing alone is not enough. The Arabic sources are unanimous that planetary-hour operations require a set of mandatory physical accompaniments without which the timing is wasted.

First: incense. The correct planetary fumigation must be burning throughout the operation. The Shams al-Anwar provides a standard base of frankincense mixed with coriander seed, to which planet-specific ingredients are added depending on the hour being worked. The fumigation is not atmospheric. It is functional. The manuscripts describe it as the medium through which spiritual entities perceive the practitioner’s presence — without it, the operator is invisible to the very beings being addressed.

Second: absolute physical purity. The practitioner must be in a state of complete ritual ablution. The al-Jawahir al-Lamma’a states that a single break in wudu’ during the planetary hour renders the entire operation void. This is not a metaphor for spiritual readiness. It is a technical requirement, treated with the same seriousness that a chemist would treat contamination of a reagent.

Third: the practitioner must face the qibla — the direction of Mecca — throughout the work. This orientation is not sectarian. The texts frame it as the alignment of the practitioner’s body with the axis of spiritual gravity, the direction from which divine permission flows.

Fourth: the ammar — the ambient jinn inhabiting the location — must be dismissed before the planetary-hour operation begins. This step, virtually unknown in Western ceremonial magic, is described in our article on the five preparatory steps that every grimoire requires. Without the dismissal of the ammar, the summoned entities cannot enter, or worse, the resident jinn interfere with the operation in ways the practitioner cannot detect.

And fifth — perhaps most remarkably — the practitioner must memorize the oath or invocation used during the planetary hour. Reading from a book is explicitly forbidden. The al-Jawahir al-Lamma’a states the reason plainly: reading “occupies the heart and removes the required reverence.” The eyes go to the page. The attention splits between the words and the act of reading. The connection is broken. The practitioner who has internalized the invocation speaks it from within — and it is this inward speaking, not the mere pronunciation of syllables, that the entities recognize.

What the Western Transmission Lost

The Latin Picatrix preserves the concept of planetary hours. It does not preserve the operational infrastructure. The 168-hour grid is absent. The angel-jinn pairings are absent. The hour-by-hour warnings — which hours are auspicious, which are disastrous, which support which operations — are reduced to generalities. The mandatory physical accompaniments are mentioned in passing or not at all. The requirement to memorize the oath does not appear.

This is not a criticism of the Picatrix. It is a recognition that the Latin translation was produced for a different audience — a court audience interested in astral theory and philosophical cosmology, not a practitioner audience that needed operational specifications. The Ghayat al-Hakim itself, in Arabic, is already more philosophical than operational. The Arabic tradition preserved the operational details in other texts — the al-Jawahir al-Lamma’a, the Shams al-Anwar, the Kitab al-Ajnas — that were never translated into Latin and therefore never entered the Western magical tradition at all.

The result is that Western planetary magic has been working from a partial blueprint for eight centuries. The timing framework exists. The execution manual does not. Or rather, it did not — until these texts became available in English.

Where to Read the Complete System

The most comprehensive presentation of the planetary hour system in any Arabic source currently available in English translation is al-Jawahir al-Lamma’a: The Radiant Jewels for Summoning the Kings of Jinn (Volume V of the John Friend Publishing series). The full 168-hour grid. The angel and jinn-king pairings for every day. The hour-by-hour operational instructions. The fumigation protocols. The memorization requirement. All of it is there, translated without abbreviation from the Arabic manuscript.

For the planetary magic-square system that operates alongside the hour grid — assigning a specific numerical square to each day and hour combination — see Shams al-Anwar wa Kunuz al-Asrar al-Kubra (Volume III), which provides the day-by-day protocols with their associated squares, incenses, and invocations. For the Solomonic conjuration framework that builds on the same planetary timing — including the conjuration oaths that must be memorized, not read — see Kitab al-Ajnas (Volume IV).

The Picatrix told the West that planetary hours matter. The Arabic sources explain exactly how. The difference between those two things is the difference between knowing that a key exists and actually holding it in your hand.