Five Missing Days on the Angel Calendar

The most common question I get about the Angel Tarot is “why are there five days missing from the calendar? I was born on one of those days and I don't know who my guardian angels are!”

Yes, it's true. There are five days (March 15, 16, 17, 18, 19) missing from the Angel Calendar, which demonstrates the ruling days of the 72 Kabbalistic Angels also called the Angels of the Shem HaMephorash. It is predicated on the idea that every person has three guardian angels assigned at birth based on the hour and day they were born.

• Your Soul Guardian is assigned based on your time of birth.

• Your Moral Guardian is assigned based on your day of birth.

• Your Physical Guardian is assigned based on the five-day period of your day of birth.

How to Solve This Problem

If you were born on one of the five missing days, you will not be able to figure out your Moral or Physical Guardian angels. However, author A.E. Waite (the same guy who created the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck) explained that if you were born on one of these days or on the 29^th of February during a leap year, then the other two angels who follow your hour of birth will serve in the roles as your other two angels.

His exact quote is:

“It should be understood that people who are born between the days March 14 - March 20, or on the 29th of February during a leap year, will have the three Angels belonging to their birth hour as guardians of the three parts of their personality.”

But WHY are there five days missing?

There is a rather complex reason that these five days have been left off the angelic calendar.

The simplest, most mathematical reason is that the sky which the angels rule over comprises a 360-degree circle, but there are 365 days in the Gregorian calendar (or 366 days on a leap year). This discrepancy alone will leave five days missing.

If you search around the internet, you'll find many modern authors have corrupted the angelic rulership calendar and "stretched" the days ruled by the angels to make a complete calendar, but they have done so out of ignorance about the original reason for the gap of dates. They cater to lazy people who don't care about which angel is actually connected to them and just want an easy answer to make them feel good without having to think too much.

If you find an angelic calendar that differs from mine. The other calendar is wrong.

But how do you know which calendar is right?

Five days have been missing from the calendars of angelic rulership in magic grimoires dating back to the 1400s, thereby pre-dating the Gregorian calendar, which was constructed in 1582. These old occult magicians were not making a mistake. They were faithfully copying and translating magic texts from the Greek manuscripts, which were, in turn, based on even older Hebrew and Egyptian texts.

So we need to push our understanding of these entities back further than Christianity and the comparatively modern Gregorian calendar.

Let's look at the numbers, for a moment to see if we can find an answer: 72 angels ruling over 360 degrees of sky = 5 degrees per angel.

The ancient Egyptians used a similar system for their calendar: 360 days divided into 36 weeks of ten days each. The Egyptians assigned a star god (collectively called “the disheveled,” “the primordials,” or “guides of Ra”) to rule over each ten day week.

So the Egyptian calendar had... FIVE missing days. Is this a coincidence?! Nope, it's not.

While there are 36 primary star gods to govern the course of the year, these were not conceptual spirits who lived in the air. They were actual stars that moved across the sky each night. The Egyptian star priests were responsible for observing and tracking their movements to figure out their impact over events on earth. The Egyptians recognized that over time, these stars were getting out of sync with the days on the calendar. They, therefore, adjusted the ruling star god by assigning an alternate star with a slightly different name.

Through this system, which evolved and changed over the course of three thousand years, they developed a total of 73 different star gods assigned to 73 different stars in the night sky.

But why is it 73 and not 72?!

Remember those five missing days? The Egyptians were not idiots. They knew how to accurately measure the length of a year and they understood that it was not actually 360 days. Their calendar had an additional five days at the end. These five days were celebrated as the equivalent of our week between Christmas and New Year's Day.

The Egyptians celebrated these five days by honoring the birth of a different major god on each day. Also, there was a special star god assigned to rule over these five days. He was called “the Two Tortoises.” He is often regarded as the 37^th of the 36 primary star gods.

Enter the Greeks

The Greek philosophers who arrived in Egypt with Alexander the Great founded the legendary Library of Alexandria. In this palace of learning, philosophers, authors, mathematicians, and scholars of all kinds came from around the ancient world to share information and collaborate.

In this melting pot, the Greeks smelted their own religious beliefs with those of Egypt, Persian, and many other cultures. The Egyptian star gods were re-named “decans” because each ruled over ten days in the calendar. They also began calling the star gods “daimons” which was a word indicating minor gods. These daimons were not considered as powerful as major gods like Isis, Ra, or Horus.

However, the Greeks recognized that they were an important part of the Egyptian astrological system. As time went by, these systems melded together and the original system of decans gave way to a lunar division of 27 or 28 lunar stations, also known as manzil (lunar mansions) and to a zodiac of 12 signs, based on an anthropomorphic pattern of constellations. This new system was immortalized on the Dendera zodiac ceiling dated to circa 50 BCE.

In their ancient magical manuscripts, the Graeco-Roman magicians lumped the decans with other spirits of the air. Belief in their ability to influence events on earth and their connection with the days of the year persisted even after Persian astrology became dominant.

Christian scholars from at least 400 AD interpreted these star gods in two different ways: either as angels or daimons (incorrectly conflating the Greek term for a minor god as a “demon”). Thus, spirits of the air, became known by the same name as true demonic spirits of the earth.

Eventually, by the Medieval Period, the textual mistranslations and conflations were forgotten and the entire system was interpreted with a Christian worldview by European occultists attempting to reconcile Kabbalistic mystic texts with their understanding of astrology and alchemy.

By the way: in the Egyptian calendar, the five days at the end would likely have been in July. They are now in March because the Shem HaMephorash system was aligned to the Biblical Hebrew calendar, which begins on 12 March. This is also why the astrological calendar begins in Aries, while the Egyptian astrological calendar began in Cancer with the appearance of Sirius.

This is how we have ended up with 72 angels and 72 demons ruling over a 365 day calendar. In reality, they are likely just 144 emanations of 36 stellar intelligences. None of them are explicitly good nor evil, but remain profoundly misunderstood in the modern era.

Who Rules Over the Five Days?

Because the Egyptians did, in fact, assign a specific star god to rule over those five days, we can attempt to surmise its identity in relation to later Hebrew traditions.

My research (see my 2021 book Cult of the Stars for more detailed textual sources) strongly suggests that the actual angel to rule over these five days is Archangel Uriel.

Uriel is often identified as the guardian of Tartarus, the domain of the exiled Titans, which were actually based on the older story of the exiled star gods (their hair was disheveled because they rebelled against Ra and he grabbed them by the hair). The word “Tartarus” is actually derived from the Latin word for “turtle.” Even the Bible backs up this assertion: “God didn’t spare the angels who sinned but threw them down into Tartarus” - 2 Peter 2:4

On the demon's side, I believe the ruler over these five days is Beelzebub. The exact reason will be expounded in a book I'm writing, it's too long and complex to explain here.