SACRED CALENDARS

By G. Cornelius & P Devereux

It is, perhaps, surprising to learn that up until the very recent past humanity understood, in a very practical sense, that time comes from the sky. It is none other than the record of celestial motion: day and night and the seasons are time.

In almost all cultures, the annual cycle of the Sun and the monthly phases of the Moon have been the foundation for the count of time beyond the day, but many different formulas have been used to arrange these basic elements. Every calendar has to cope with awkward fractions: for example, there are approximately 29.5 days in a lunar month and just under 365.25 days in a year. As these fractions accumulate, fixed festivals drift away from the phenomena they mark. The solution is intercalation, the periodic insertion of an extra day or other unit of time to realign a calendar with the heavens. Mesoamerican civilization developed a system of time-keeping on a number-base of 20, super-imposed on an early solar calendar of 365 days. With the help of the calendar, the Maya achieved accurate astronomical computations. They established the synodical period of Venus (when the Earth, Sun and Venus come into the same alignment) as just under 587 days. Thus, five Venus synods (2,920 days) coincided with eight solar years of 365 days; the Maya held a ceremony every eight years, when they fine-tuned their Venus calendar to allow for the time it had fallen behind the true Venus cycle.

Modern time-keeping is deeply influenced by the stellar worship of ancient Babylon and Chaldea in ways that are now hardly recognizable, although they are still, reflected in many European languages is immediately apparent; the Lord’s day (Sunday) remains solar in German and English, French, Spanish and Italian show us the planets Mars, Mercury, Jupiter (or Jove, Greek Zeus) and Venus for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. English gives Saturday to Saturn, while English and German use Teutonic equivalents of the Roman gods for Tuesday (Tiwaz), Thursday (Donar), and Friday (Frea). The English Wednesday is from Wodan (Anglo-Saxon Woden), who was identified with Mercury.