Before clocks were mechanical, the hour was a twelfth of the daylight. Twelve from sunrise to sunset, twelve more from sunset to the next sunrise, and almost never the same length as each other. A summer day in these latitudes runs day hours well past ninety minutes and night hours under half an hour. Only near an equinox do the two agree.
Each of those hours is ruled by one of the seven classical planets in the Chaldean order, and the first hour after sunrise belongs to the planet that names the day. That is where our weekday names come from, and it is the whole of the arithmetic: twenty-four hours advance the order by three places, which is why Saturday hands on to Sunday and Sunday to Monday.
Wiccan Clock works all of that out for your own place and date, on your device, with no signal and no account.
Features
- The Dial — twenty-four segments drawn at their real lengths, so a summer day lays long gilt hours across the top of the ring and short indigo ones beneath. The present hour glows in its planet’s own metal, and the horizon is a dashed chord that sits on the diameter only at an equinox
- The hour card — the ruling planet, the time left counting down, and what the hour is for in the Key of Solomon’s own words
- A schedule for any day — step to any date and read the whole twenty-four, with sunrise, sunset and the length of each hour. Hours whose planet also rules the day are marked, since practice prizes the two agreeing
- A planner that answers when — choose your planets, say whether the hour must fall on that planet’s own day or any day, pick day hours or night hours, and search up to a year ahead
- Save any result as an election with a note and an alert at your own lead time
- The Moon beside every hour — phase, sign, the next ingress, and whether she is void of course
- Several places saved, each with its own time zone, so a site on the other side of the world reads in its own local hours rather than yours
- Four widgets — two for the Home Screen carrying the ruling planet and the countdown, two for the Lock Screen
- Notifications you choose — the start of a chosen planet’s hour, the first hour of its own day, a saved election, or the beginning of a void of course
- Engraved plates for all seven planets in the manner of the sixteenth-century children of the planets prints
- Universal — on iPad the dial sits at full size beside the hour card, in every orientation, and beside it on the open iPhone Duo in landscape
- No account, no subscription, no adverts, no tracking and no analytics
Honest About Its Sources
The uses of each hour are quoted word for word from S. L. MacGregor Mathers’ 1889 translation of the Key of Solomon, read from page images of the Redway first edition rather than from a transcription. Where the circulating transcriptions tidy the printing’s grammar, the app follows the printing. Nothing is paraphrased and no passage is cut short at a convenient clause, which on Saturn means the chapter’s own talk of destruction and discord stands as it was set.
The metals come from Agrippa’s Scale of the Number Seaven, 1651. On where these hours are attested, three printings are quoted directly:
“Vnderstond wel, þat thise howris in-equalis ben cleped howres of planetes, & vnderstond wel þat som tyme ben thei lengere by day [than] by nyht, & som tyme the contrarie.” Chaucer, A Treatise on the Astrolabe, 1391
Agrippa gives the rule in English in 1651 and William Lilly prints the working practice in Christian Astrology in 1647. Every planet page carries its citation under the field it belongs to.
Planetary hours are Hellenistic astrology, carried into Renaissance ceremonial magic and taken up by modern witchcraft in the twentieth century. They are far older than Wicca, and the app says so plainly rather than selling the one as the other.
About the Numbers
Sunrise and sunset are the instants the Sun’s upper limb meets the horizon under standard refraction, solved to the second by bisection rather than sampled at intervals. Twenty-two sunrise and sunset pairs at six sites across four dates of 2026 were checked against the US Naval Observatory: the worst error was 0.57 of a minute, inside USNO’s own rounding. An hour boundary inherits a twelfth of that, which is under three seconds.
Taking the geometric horizon instead, as a simpler app might, would have been out by up to twenty minutes.
Inside the Arctic and Antarctic circles the Sun can stay up or down for a whole civil day, and then the unequal hours do not exist at all. Wiccan Clock says so in words and draws nothing, rather than carrying yesterday’s hours forward or inventing a reckoning the tradition never defined. On the morning a polar spell breaks it holds its tongue until the Sun is actually up.
Privacy
No ads. No tracking. No analytics. No subscriptions. No in-app purchases. No account.
Every hour, every sunrise and every position of the Moon is computed on your device. The app touches the network only if you ask it to turn a typed place name into coordinates, and you can type the coordinates yourself instead and never touch it at all. Full detail in the privacy policy.
Support
Need help with Wiccan Clock? Whether you have a question, want to request a feature, or need to report a problem:
- Ask a question — get help using the app
- Report a bug — let us know if something isn’t working
- Request a feature — suggest an improvement
You can also browse existing issues to see if your question has already been answered.