Board Thread:The Last Sovereign Discussion/@comment-39332473-20190808194309/@comment-31763506-20200120092941

NoelMittUns wrote: There are 7 days of the week because there are seven classical planets. Sunday is for the Sun, monday is for the Moon, saturday for Saturn... The other days have names from ancient germanic mythology which I can't bother to remember, but it's more clear in French: mardi for Mars, mercredi for Mercury, jeudi for Jupiter, vendredi for Venus. Each day is dominated by a planet's influence. I could elaborate on the classical time system, but that's the gist of it. It's not really about working hours, since people didn't work nearly as much in the medieval period as they do now.

"It would make us work more" is totally the reason why the ten-days calendar proposed in the French revolution didn't catch, however. People had totally forgotten the astrological origins of this stuff.

You're being a bit too dogmatic in limiting yourself to one level of causality. Yes, the seven classical planets are probably why the Babylonians decided to go with a seven day week, but that doesn't explain why the system has stuck around since its inception, which is that every attempt to replace it with something else has worked badly.

Compare the dissolution of the monasteries in English history. The proximate reason that they happened was that Henry VIII was thinking with his dick in religious politics and needed the money, but that doesn't explain why NEW monasteries weren't founded and kept around once Queen Mary rose to the throne, or during the Stuart periods when "High Church" Anglicanism was dominant or during the "Oxford Movement" of the 19th century. The monks had justified their existence since the Roman period by being the principle manufacturers of books and the main teachers. The printing press did away with that first reason for being. My understanding of Early Modern French socioeconomics is pretty thin on the ground, but the two Catholic orders I'm most familiar with as an American are the Jesuits and the Brothers of the Christian Schools, both of which were founded explicitly for an educational mission after the renaissance as opposed to a more traditional monastic community, so my understanding is that French monks and nuns after the start of the Bourbon dynasty had to work as teachers instead of as professional prayers to justify the cost of their upkeep.

It's like people who dislike Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" arguing against the Conquistadors military weapons' superiority and unintentional bioweapons being the determining factor in the subjection of the Aztec and Inca empires; and doing so by listing all of the contingent lucky breaks Cortez and Pizarro needed to pull off their respective campaigns. That explains why Cortez and Pizarro succeeded and not why the Spanish succeeded. There were plenty of native revolts in Mexico and Greater Peru throughout the Colonial Period up to the final collapse of mainland Spanish power in the Napoleonic Wars, but none of them ever succeeded on a permanent basis, probably because the Americas were still dependent on Europe for making weapons up until the 1800s.