BIG GREG

How the Western calendar evolved into the world’s Number 1  

By Pip Wilson

Click stars for the Universe today

Cafe Diem! Our store

The Celtic Tree Calendar

The Summer Solstice

The 13th Sign

The Secret Language of Birthdays

Holiday Symbols

Holidays and Anniversaries of the World

 
A Calendar of Festivals

The Sabbats

Midsummer

Beltane

Lammas

Candlemas

Yule

The Winter Solstice

 

Happy New Year!

Sing it! Shout it! Whisper it! Slur it!

These three words are uttered by millions of people around the world every year as a new calendar is launched on January 1.

The special moment of time - December 31 at midnight, to be precise - that signifies the discarding of the old and the adoption of the new, is widely and deeply respected, but its location just happens to be totally arbitrary.

Time is something we all understand as long as no one asks us to explain or define it. None of us really knows what, if anything, it is made of, whence it comes, how to stop it nor how to change its direction. Really, most of what we actually know about time is merely how to measure it. This is something humankind has been doing and refining since ‘time immemorial’. To this end, our species has developed sundials, watches and all kinds of clocks: cuckoo clocks, grandfather clocks, even atomic clocks. And we have developed calendars.

We tend to take our calendar for granted, but we might ask how it came to be. It did not drop from the sky - well, it did metaphorically - but has evolved over millennia, shaped by the observations, calculations and edicts of a myriad of astronomers and emperors, clerics and mathematicians, bureaucrats and business people.

There is not one calendar, but about forty of them in use in the world today. The Gregorian Calendar, the one we use, however, is by far the most widespread. It has an interesting lineage - we can’t begin at the beginning, but we can go back a bit.  

Because most of us live removed from Nature, hardly ever noticing what is happening in the sky above us, today we are scarcely aware of the movements of the heavenly bodies. This is not the case amongst tribal and agricultural societies, and for most of history, human beings have observed the starry canopy much more than we ever will. Millennia ago, people - particularly specialists such as astronomers and number crunchers - had observed that this thing we call time could be measured and traced by reference to celestial phenomena. Time could be divided into bits and pieces instead of just wafting on and on like some kind of gas.

It was dead easy, even for primeval hominids, to notice that the sun played a special game which related closely to the ‘piece of time’ between ‘wakie-wakies’ or between ‘night-nights’. Obviously enough, the day was recognised as a basic unit of time by the interval between consecutive apparent risings of the most noticeable celestial body, the sun.

Actually, it was the interval between sunset and the next sunset that was very often how ‘day’ was defined. The Jewish day, for example, has always begun at sunset, and until quite recently so too did the English day, which is why we speak of a fortnight - fourteen nights. A week used to be called a sennight. The day began at sunrise for the Babylonians, Syrians and Persians, and still does for modern Greeks; at noon, for the ancient Egyptians and modern astronomers. We begin it at midnight when most of us are asleep and don’t notice.

The next most obvious and effective way to subdivide time was by the habits of the other great orb in the canopy, the moon. The regular waxing and waning of the moon was noticed to be a period of 29½ days. Most probably, the moon was assigned an identity with female deities (despite ‘the man in the moon’) because this period approximates the duration of the menstrual cycle. People now had a handy length of time, longer than a day, to work with. As any Westerner knows from cowboys and Indians movies, tribal people have a lunar-speak (‘I have travelled seven moons to be with you, Two Frogs Ducking’). This game played by the moon goddess came to be known as a moonath, or month.

It didn’t take Newtonian mind power for ancient peoples quickly to work out that the sun appears to shift its daily wake-up point, just a fraction at a time. Northern Hemispherians, for it was they who created the Gregorian calendar, saw that the sun rose almost due east in summer (when the days were long and hot), appearing to rise each day a bit more southwards along the horizon until winter (when the days were short and cold), then turned around and moved northwards till summer. The two extremes were called the summer and winter solstices. The halfway points in this progression, when the sun rose midway between the north and the south, were recognised as well; today we call them the spring and autumn equinoxes. On those occasions the days were neither long nor short, but just as long as the nights. They noticed, too, that this repetitive game played by the sun always took the same amount of time. In fact, it took about 365 days, they realised. They called this game of the sun a year.

Then a big problem hit our ancestors. The relationships between the day, the month and the year were all over the shop. Twenty-nine and a half into 365 just won’t go. You end up with twelve-and-a-bit. When attempts were made to fit twelve lunar cycles into the solar year (or tropical year as we call it now), there were always a few days left over. The problem exists in all lunisolar calendars, of which there are some left even today; for example, the Moslem, Jewish and Christian church calendars use both Selene (the moon goddess) and Sol (the sun god). Easter, for example, is defined as ‘the first Sunday after the full moon which happens upon or next after the equinox of  March 21; and if the full moon happens upon a Sunday, Easter Day is the Sunday after.’ Got it? (Note that, just to confuse the matter, the Vernal Equinox may be as early as March 20.)

In time, in the two or three millennia before the Christian epoch, successors to the ancient agricultural people tended to dispense with the lunar cycle. No one will ever be certain, but there is in scholarly circles a strong suspicion that there was a natural and consequent decline of goddess worship and parallel ascendancy of reverence for the male gods. Certainly it seems that as Middle Eastern and European people moved from camping out to living in towns, there was a greater emphasis on the great male gods, such as Odin, Mithras, Osiris, Zeus and Jupiter. (The birthdays of most of these gods were celebrated at the winter solstice when the people most longed for the heat of the sun to return, which explains why we have Christmas on December 25, almost bang on the solstice.) Many argue that the rise of patriarchy is closely intertwined with the lunar question, among other factors. It might well be a chicken and egg riddle.  

The Babylonian empire, blessed with the best mathematicians and astronomers of the day,  managed to run a lunisolar calendar for centuries, one which even survived the conquest of Babylon by the Persians in 539 BCE. The Persians refined it even further. They used the fact that 235 lunar months are equal to 19 solar years, a discovery made by the Greek astronomer Meton in about 430 BCE. The Metonic Cycle, by which the full moon appears on the same date every 19 years, could be used by calendar makers to correct the way the lunar months drifted through the solar calendar. Even today, the magical Metonic number has to be made use of by the church authorities to work out Easter’s exact date, a fact which can be found in the front of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. (Just to confuse the issue, the Metonic cycle turned out to be out by 1½ hours each year: there was still a ‘lunar drift’ through the Christian calendar that added up over centuries and by the 16^th century they had to have all sorts of intercalations - sticking in days or months - and adjustments. That’s calendars for you.)

The old concept of months hung on, however, though to divide the year evenly into twelve moons, these increasingly practical and organised city slickers fibbed a bit and made the months around 30 days long - sometimes 31. The only other option was to go with real lunar months and every few years throw in (or intercalate) an extra month to fill up the gap caused by the drift. By now out of touch with such rural practices as moon planting, management called in the efficiency experts and opted for tidy ‘calendar months’ instead.

By about 300 BCE, too, Egyptian astronomers had worked out that a year actually took about 365 days plus a quarter day, which was no help to anybody, only complicating the matter. In Europe the lunisolar calendar became the norm, with all its imperfections, as an oriental version of it did in China where it was in use until 1912 (when they adopted our western Gregorian solar calendar - blame globalisation and copy-cat industrialisation). The big difference is that the Chinese kept the 29½-day real McCoy months, probably because their society was so agricultural. They use the old calendar even now for their year of festivals, but they use the Gregorian one when they do business.  

Unfortunately in ancient Rome, those officials whose duty it was to work out which months would have 30 days and which 31, became increasingly corrupt and did deals for political purposes, such as delaying elections. The Roman calendar was also hopelessly complex, with every month having special religious days called calends (from which the name calendar comes), ides and nones. As every English-speaking schoolchild knows, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was killed on ‘the ides of March’.

Dissatisfied with the mess the calendar got into, Julius Caesar, in 46 BCE, obtained the advice of the astronomer Sisogenes, who drew up a beautiful new calendar named the Julian calendar, possibly because it is more euphonious than ‘the Sisogenesian calendar’, or possibly because the emperor decreed it so. Julius based it upon the old Egyptian solar calendar, keeping the old Roman month names such as Januarius and Februarius. The former was named after the god Janus, who had two faces, one of which looked forwards and the other backwards, suggesting the way we usually are at New Year. The latter was named from the word februare, meaning to purify, which was due to a purification ceremony to the love goddess Juno in mid-month: its vestiges are our modern Valentine’s Day on February 14.

Among a host of technical changes deemed necessary by Sisogenes, Julius decreed that because the solar year is 365 days plus that pesky extra quarter day, there would be thenceforth three years of 365 days and the fourth would be of 366. We still have this ‘leap year’ system. We also have the Latin names for the months such as September, meaning ‘seventh month’, October (‘eighth’) and November (‘ninth’). The reason for these names being wrong by two months comes from the Roman intercalation of two months to correct lunar drift.

You might be thinking that by now we’d got it right. Wrong. What Sisogenes didn’t know was that the actual tropical year is approximately 365 days, five hours, 48 minutes and 46.5 seconds long, not 365¼ days exactly. More trouble. That 11-minute, 13.5-second discrepancy certainly adds up over the centuries. So much so that by the 16^th century the calendar was out by a whopping ten days. So the equinoxes and solstices were ten days from true. Apart from anything else, it really made the Easter moon hard to figure out.  So Pope Gregory XIII reformed the calendar, making ten days disappear at the stroke of a quill. Again, the boffins (Copernicus, Aloysius Lilius and Christopher Clavius) didn’t get the credit, and from February 24, 1582 the West had a new calendar, the aforementioned Gregorian model.

Calendar reform in England, 1752

These were years of turmoil in the Church, and Protestantism had broken out all over Europe. The Catholic countries, of course, took on the new calendar, but the Protestant countries wouldn’t have a bar of it, no more than the Orthodox Christian countries would. Finally though, even the Prots had to see the sense in it and England caught up with the real world in 1752. By now the English were out by eleven days, which King George II (by the Calendar Act of 1751) had to pinch from the calendar. Wednesday, September 2, 1752 was followed by Thursday,  September 14, 1752 to accommodate this change and be consistent with the rest of Europe. They called the new dates New Style, and New Style or NS is still used to signify which calendar date we are referring to, as we might do in the case of birthdays of people who lived around that time, even if not English, such as Benjamin Franklin, for example.

This theft was not taken kindly to by the workers and peasants, however, many of whom rioted with banners reading ‘Give us back our eleven days’ (I presume this is where Calendar Riots got its name). Historians say that they thought they had been robbed of eleven days’ pay. Maybe they had. There was also much concern that by following continental Europe's Gregorian calendar, ‘Popery’ was afoot.

Generations of English folk had become used to a certain oak tree near Malwood Castle in Hampshire budding each year on Christmas day. The locals said they would use this tree to prove the propriety or otherwise of the change. When it failed to bud until January 5, Epiphany Eve (or the Eve of Twelfth Day), the ‘anti-Gregorians’ became confirmed in their opposition to the reforms, and for generations they celebrated the religious feasts on the Old Style (OS) calendar.  

As another lesser known consequence of the Calendar Act, 1751 was a short year, running only from March 25 (Lady Day) to December 31. New Year's Day had to move from March 25 to January 1, as had been the case in Scotland for some time, as it had gone Gregorian in 1600. The City of London refused to pay taxes early, so the powers that be moved the financial year's commencement to April 6, where it incongruously remains, to the irritation of many.

It can all get very confusing and working out dates of events, festivals and so on can be fraught with difficulties for harmless drudges such as almanackists. For example, in The Tower of London there is a graffito scratched into a cell wall by some poor bloke imprisoned in January, 1642, for his role in the Battle of Edgehill – which didn't even take place until October 23, 1642!

Because they were still  British colonials, the Americans got what the British got, like it or not. (A colonial named Ben Franklin was the brains behind a scheme, widely practised in Australia even now, to ‘add’ daylight to people’s waking hours. We call Franklin’s brainchild Daylight Saving; but that’s another story.) The following two and a half centuries of English-speaking hegemony over much of the world ensured the eventual capitulation of most of the world’s calendars to Big Greg, or NS. Notable exceptions are the Jewish and Moslem calendars. The Greek Orthodox countries accepted the inevitable change to NS in 1924 for civil purposes, but maintain OS for ecclesiastical purposes, which is why your Greek neighbours celebrate Easter when you don’t.

The Soviet Union's adoption of the Gregorian calendar was by a decree of the Council of People's Commissars, dated January 25, 1918. Russia, in the sway of the Russian Orthodox Church, had hung in there with OS until the Communists could hold back the tide no longer and switched to NS. Which is why the October Revolution happened in November. Still with me?

Pope Gregory’s calendar is far from ideal, but works well enough for it to have survived not only more than 240 years of usage, but also an attempt in the United Nations in 1952 to reform it. There have been numerous calendars developed to do away with Big Greg. The first and best known was that of Revolutionary France. That experiment lasted from 1793 until Napoleon sat on it in 1806. In true radical style, the red-bereted sans culottes renamed the twelve months and divided each into three lots of ten days, thus dispelling our weeks. They also had five intercalary days, called sanscullottides. (This calendar struck a blow at a tradition which Europe has had for more than two thousand years. The week of seven days was a Middle Eastern idea picked up by the Romans, who gave the days the names of seven gods which related to five planets and the sun and moon. The European languages retain these associations: in English some of the gods were transmogrified into ancient Norse deities, hence Wednesday is the day of the god Woden, Friday of the goddess Frigg.)

Calendar reform is a passion with many today. From time to time the US Congress is presented with propositions for newfangled calendars with names such as World Calendar or Perpetual Calendar. Ask any search engine on the Internet to seek Calendar + reform and you’ll see what I mean. It gives lonely nerds something to occupy their evenings. Indeed, there are strong arguments for reform, and many reformers are motivated by the highest motives, including a strong sense of globality and world peace. Frequently reform calendars contain a World Day, which to this writer has far more appeal than many of the holidays celebrated today solely as havens of consumer fantasies. Perhaps a reformed calendar could be creative, like that of the Aztecs with symbols and names of planets, birds, colours, deities and a host of other interesting phenomena. Chances are, though, that the wrong people would hijack it and the potential for creative globality in the calendar would be transmuted into a grab bag of Coca-Colonialism: Britney Spears Day, PlayStation Tuesday, McMothers’Day. And you can bet your life it’ll be called GlobalCal.

Ultimately, though, it seems as though Big Greg will be around for a while yet. The Jewish faith will continue with its calendar which dates from 3671 BC (the Creation), and the Islamic faith will have its calendar, dating from July 16, 622, the Hegira, when Mohammed fled from Mecca to Yathrib. Religious and cultural calendars around the world will remain, many of them lunisolar marvels spangled with festivals and quaintness. But the Gregorian Calendar, the datemaker of business, is still spreading like a Reformation-era Microsoft, into the furthest nooks and crannies of the globe.

What is today’s date in the Anglo-Saxon calendar? 
Click here to find out (you will need your latitude and longitude, so click here).

Index of articles on folklore and other topics

The calendar and primitive almanacs

What is the Goddess Calendar?

Celtic Tree Calendar

Almanacs, calendars and time links

Alchemy clock    Barcode clock

Today in the Discordian calendar

Blue Moon: Folklore, or fakelore ?

 

Folklore, customs, pre-Christian origins of: 

Epiphany  Candlemas/Imbolc  Hall Sunday  Collop Monday  Shrove Tuesday/Pancake Day

  Ash Wednesday & Lent  Mid-Lent  Care Sunday  Painful Friday  Lazarus Saturday

  Palm Sunday  Spy Wednesday  Maundy Thursday  Good Friday  Easter Saturday  Easter

Easter Monday  Easter Tuesday  Hocktide  Ascension  Rogation Days  Whitsunday/Whitsuntide

Corpus Christi  May Day/Beltaine  Lammas/Lughnasadh  Michaelmas  Halloween/Samhain

Martinmas  Advent  Christmas Eve  Christmas  More at Articles Index

Hundreds of feast days of saints, gods and goddesses at Wilson's Almanac Book of Days

 

Today in the Old Icelandic Calendar

Java applet © Tim Stridmann, http://norse.ulver.com

 

Calendar convergence and 2012 »

About 2000 CE and 2012, several calendric 
cycles from around the world end ... 
Interesting coincidence 
or is there more to it? Lots of calendar links here.

 

The Shepheardes Calender:

 

Ianuarye	Februarie	March	Aprill
Maye	Iune	Iulye	August
September	October	Nouember	December

Calendar conversions: 13 Moon, Mayan, Jewish, etc

Perpetual Calendar (Gregorian/New Style)

Calendar chronology

More on calendars

A favourite of mine: Calendar Zone

Calendars from the Sky

A Walk through Time

Money is Time Clock

Lunabar

Blame the madness on Dennis the Short

 

 

Julian Day Number and Civil Date Calculator (pop-up)    Lunar phase info (pop-up)