How Much Does Choosing the Day Matter?

Translator's note. A short piece stating one rule, cleanly, and worth having on its own: in date selection, the unit of time you get wrong determines the size and the delay of the consequence. Get the year wrong and the disaster is large and arrives within two years; get the hour wrong and it is small and arrives within ten days. The remainder of the original is a course advertisement and has been omitted.

The influence of date selection on a fate is not to be underestimated.

A person does a great many things in a lifetime, some large and some small. Whatever it is — and for large undertakings especially: marriage, burial, moving house, building, founding a business, taking up a post — if you choose the wrong year for it, then within two years there will certainly be a disaster of matching scale.

If you choose the wrong month, then within half a year there will be a disaster of corresponding, middling scale.

If you choose the wrong day, then within thirty days there will be trouble of an ordinary kind, of matching kind.

If you choose the wrong hour, then within ten days there will be some small misfortune, matching in kind.

The rule runs the other way too. Choose the right year for a large undertaking and within two years there will be a great good fortune matching it. The right month, and within half a year there will be good of a middling scale. The right day, and within thirty days there will be ordinary good. The right hour, and within ten days there will be small good.

For lesser matters the year carries little weight. There the day and the hour matter, and the good or ill they carry reaches at most thirty days. It does not settle anything permanently.

Note what the rule actually claims. It is not “a bad day brings bad luck.” It is a table of scale against delay: the coarser the unit you got wrong, the larger the consequence and the longer before it lands; the finer the unit, the smaller the consequence and the sooner. That is a specific, falsifiable claim, and a reader can test it against their own record of undertakings.