Enchanted Hours And Magical Times

Measuring time and magic

Adding magic to your world can add to the ways you measure time in your world¹. A flower clock where the flowers open to the minute, perhaps. But time itself can affect the magic you add.

Witness that many spells may actually have functioned as timing devices in eras where they had nothing more reliable. There may actually be elements of having to practice your incantations to time the brewing process correctly for a potion or other mix. You may have to strip down, or build up, your incantation to the necessary time.

Everyone knows that wizards work in towers and wear robes with stars, and possibly moons and suns, and possibly astrological symbols. This is because, back in the day when the branches of knowledge were not so divided as they are today, a wizard was an astronomer was an astrologer. The clothes were a badge of office, and the tower was to let you get closer to the stars and farther from earthly lights.

You don't even need astrology in your world for this to continue. Making good calendars is important for all manner of matters, and is seldom simple.

Especially if the times are useful for magic. They are often deemed so in folklore. Or the wizards need to deal with the dangerous times and so identify them.

But if something requires noon, I suspect that Solar Mean Noon will not cut it. You want Apparent Solar Noon, when the sun is at zenith. The problem is that you can use Apparent Solar Noon, or you can have exactly 24 hours of the same length between noons -- or whatever quantity of whatever unit you choose. There's up to a quarter of an hour difference between the 24-hour spot and when the noon reaches zenith.

Or perhaps wizards check the almanac to find out what time noon is, as well as what time sunrise is, or sunset. Or, presumably, midnight. All of which may have significance.

After all, liminal times -- threshold times, times between one state and another -- are significant in magic. Shifting from morning to afternoon, from night to day, from day to night, from closer to sunset to closer to sunrise.

The Fair Folk can move in such times. Ghosts can walk in them. Spells can be wrought in them. No matter what your wizards intend, they may need to work magic protections in that time².

Especially, of course, if the liminal time is also an equinox or a solstice, which are liminal themselves, an equinox being when day and night are briefly equal before which one is longer changes, and a solstice when they briefly cease to change their lengths before changing direction. See above about calendars.

And of course, when creating magical objects that deal with time, one way or another, the symbolism will matter, whether you use clockwork, or hourglasses, or sundials.³

Though nowadays quaint ornaments, sundials were, for a long time, the only measuring object. If your wizards have a choice, however, the symbolism of sundials is a direct connection with the sun such that it will show Apparent Solar Noon, hours that lengthen and shorten with the seasons, and work only in sunlight, and therefore it would work best for seasonal magics.

Hourglasses (and water clocks) have a finality that the others do not; time runs out, and it must all be reset to start again. (Which is probably why hourglasses are still used as a symbol of lifespan, and how time flies.) An hourglass would symbolically limit things to a hard duration, a useful trait in spells.

Clockwork, on the other hand, rolls on endlessly. It can ape the hourglass by having an alarm, but that's tacked on, not its nature. (Sometimes tacked on with a superstition that a clock will stop when its owner dies.) Its natural form is ever rolling time, without reference to any outside events, and thus symbolically useful for constant time.

Chiming the hours heightens some points of time without really changing the flow. They can be used for various purposes. At one extreme, some works make the twelfth hour at New Year's liminal time: the old year stops at the first chime, and the new begins at the twelfth, and in between all runs wild after the manner of liminal time. Then, like all liminal times, it runs smoothly again, setting a limited duration as definitively as an hourglass, but without the hard ending.

Until, of course, someone has to wind it up. How often it has to be wound up will be significant. Unless you go all the way and make it electronic. Then current may be significant. Or magic. To have your clockwork driven by time itself would be the most symbolic effect of all.

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