In 45 B.C.E, the Julian calendar was introduced by Julius Caesar. Caesar took advice from an astronomer named Sosigenes and eliminated the period of Intercalaris which was an undefined period at the end of the year. He then assigned all months other than February either 30 or 31 days. This lengthened the calendar to 365 days in common years and added an extra day every fourth year resulting in 366 days in leap years. These changes converted their old nominally lunar calendar to one that was truly solar. Unfortunately, the Julian calendar introduced an error of 1 day every 128 years because the tropical year shifts one day backwards with respect to the calendar. The calendar was not a public document, but was guarded by priests whose job it was to make it work and determine the dates of religious holidays, festivals, and the days when business could and could not be conducted. These priests determined that God was all and that nothing or 0 was equated with evil, so the priests started the calendar with the year one instead of zero, which would have made more sense logically.
When Julius Caesar was assassinated on the steps of the Senate in Rome on 15 March 44BC, the Senate honored him and decreed that the seventh month, Quintilis, should be renamed Julius, and it became July. Later the Senate wanted to avoid slighting the Emperor Augustus, so they changed the name Sextilius to August and made it 31 days long, so that it was equal to July. This day was taken from February, and to avoid 3 successive 31-day months, September was shortened to 30 days, October lengthened to 31.
Around 150 AD Christians began to slowly take over the pagan festival of Saturnalia (which celebrated the winter solstice). This festival was a ten day feast that began on Dec. 15th and ended on Dec. 25th. For Romans, Saturn was the god of sowing and reaping. Saturn, which was associated with Saturday and the Sabbath, was also identified with Chronos. Chronos was both the Greek god of harvest and the personification of time or “Father Time”. Chronos is always capitalized, which in ancient Greek signifies a proper noun, such as a person. Its root is used in “chronology” and chronological.
In 321AD, the seven day week based on the Bible, with Sunday as its Holy Day, was introduced by the Roman emperor Constantine as part of the Christian reforms. They were named after planets and eventually some days took names from Norse mythology.
It was around AD 850 to AD 1150 that the Anastazi (meaning ancient ones) of the American Southwest were constructing the Chaco Canyon dagger which also marked time. It was constructed with huge stones that created shadows where a dagger of light pierce the center of a spiral on the Winter solstice. On the equinox two light daggers straddled the sides of the spiral. The age of Chaco Canyon houses which were built to align with the sun have been established by tree-ring dating to be from AD 850 to AD 1150. It was built with 225,000 trees brought from 80 miles away. We can only imagine how they may have further developed time keeping.
In 1400 AD, books were rare and only the elite knew how to read. It was because the early church wanted to replace the festival of Satrunalia with a more controlled celebration, that they started putting on “miracle plays” to tell the people stories from the Bible. Special plays were held at special times of the year, in accordance with the early Christian Calendar of Saints. In those days, the story to tell on December 24 was about the Garden of Eden, and the downfall of Adam and Eve. The play showed how the serpent tempted Eve, how she picked the apple from the forbidden tree, and how the couple was expelled from Eden. In Germany, because there were no apples hanging on trees in December, they brought an evergreen tree into the house, and tied red apples onto it. This is how red and green became the traditional colors of Christmas. They called the tree a “Paradiesbaum” (Paradise Tree), because it symbolized the eviction of Adam and Eve from Paradise. The beauty of a tree hung with apples in the winter was so attractive that many families adopted the tradition of putting up a Paradiesbaum in their homes. The custom lasted long after the miracle plays disappeared. Eventually a “Mass for Christ” or Christ Mass replaced Saturnalia. The Paradiesbaum became the “Weihnachtsbaum” (Holy Night Tree). It is coincidental that Christians now celebrate the birth of Christ on the same day Adam and Eve were evicted from Paradise, and the Winter Solstice, which was the Pagan celebration of the birth of the new Sun. The Solstice was on Christmas in those days, but because of the precession of the Equinoxes combined with calandar reform, was displaced.
Over time, the Mass for Christ became mixed up with the German/Norse Yuletide celebration of the New Year. The Yuletide was a 12-day festival that ended with the burning of the Yule log. It is believed this 12 day festival was from an earlier tradition that may have originated in India and celebrated the 12 positions of the Sun as it went around the Zodiac. This is why a song was eventually written about the 12 days of Christmas. Santa Claus was a Norse sprite, or fairy that brought a different gift each of the12 days until the Yuletide feast. Santa Claus eventually merged into the gift giving St. Nicholas, though the two figures had nothing in common at first. One interesting note is that Santa’s suit was originally green in color with brown earth tone boots and belt. The green hat he wore was more like the “Robin Hood” archers hat.
Slowly over time, scientists continued to study the heavens. The Catholic Church became the primary opponent to the Heliocentric view that the Earth revolved around the Sun. During the Renaissance, Nicolaus Copernicus a Polish monk, physician, astrologier, proposed a heliocentric model of the solar system and was persecuted. Giordano Bruno an Italian philosopher burned at stake in the 1580′s for holding opinions contrary to the Catholic Faith which included speaking against its ministers and for teaching Copernicus’s heliocentric view.
In 1582 AD, Pope Gregory XIII ordered the advancement of the calendar by 10 days and introduced a new corrective device to curb further error. Century years such as 1700 or 1800 would no longer be counted as leap years, unless they were (like 1600 or 2000) divisible by 4. Many counties had delayed the adoption of the new Gregorian calendar. The British Calendar Act of 1751, declared the day after Wednesday the second to be Thursday the fourteenth there by advancing the calendar by twelve days. However, some countries (for example, Greece and Russia) used the old Julian calendar into the 1900s, and the Orthodox Church in Russia still uses it, as do some other Orthodox churches.
In the early 1,600’s AD, Johannes Kepler was the first to devise a system that described correctly the details of the motion of the planets with the Sun at the center. However, Kepler did not succeed in formulating a theory behind the laws he wrote down.
Galileo defended, expanded upon, and corrected Copernicus’s work by using telescopes to enhance Copernicus’s observations. In 1612, opposition arose to the Sun-centered solar system which Galileo supported. By 1616, Cardinal Bellarmino warned Galileo to stop teaching Copernican astronomy or he would be charged with heresy. Galileo was put under house arrest for the last years of his life for advancing and teaching that the Earth was not flat and that it orbitted around the Sun. The Catholic Church then banded certain forbidden books concerning the heliocentric view. It wasn’t until the late 1,600’s when Newton’s invention of the reflecting telescope, celestial dynamics and his law of gravitation, that the motions of the planets was sufficiently explained.
It wasn’t until two hundred years later in 1822 AD, that Pope Pius VII finally allowed the printing of heliocentric books in Rome.
We are still using the Gregorian calendar developed when the Earth was thought to be flat and at the center of the Solar system. Our current Gregorian calendar is disconnected from nature and the heavens. It is a calendar that was developed based on waging war, extracting taxation and keeping people on a religious holiday schedule of man tied to a dead Roman culture that honors questionable leaders, Julius and Augustus Caesar. It has become more of a tool that promotes consumption than a device to serve the good of all. Currently our months are random lengths of either, 31, 30 or 28 days long. This causes each month to start on a different day every year because it on a cycle that doesn’t repeat until fourteen years have passed. We operate in this inefficient and chaotic manor because we have been educated, indoctrinated, and programmed to follow the Gregorian calendar and most of us can not imagine anything different and are afraid of change.
Do we accept that this Gregorian calendar as some unchangeable ultimate truth of religion and government or do we believe that the calendar can continue to evolve into something that will help humanity evolve?
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A Short History of the Calendar
The first calendars were developed in Egypt over 4000 years before the birth of Jesus. The earliest documentation of celebration of the Winter Solstice with evergreens goes back to ancient Egyptians, when they brought them into the house as markers when the Nile would flood. Throughout Ancient Egypt, the sun was considered to be a universal creator, symbolized by Ra, a hawk-headed male image bearing the solar disk on his head. Ra was considered to be ill at the Winter Solstice as he was sinking low on the horizon. The Egyptians brought 12 green palm rush shoots into their homes as a symbol of the completed year to celebrate the suns rising again after the solstice. This symbolized the triumph of life over death because it was believed that the palm grew a new shoot each month and they believed it represented the 12 divisions of the zodiac. This eventually became the basis of the “12 days of Christmas”. During this time, the week length was 8 days which were named after the planets. The Egyptians believed that the most distant planet was Saturn which is why the festival of Saturnalia eventually evolved to be on the Winter Solstice which was at the end of the year.
In Europe, the first phase building of Stonehenge began approximately 1900 years before the beginning of the Gregorian calendar. It is believed that Stonehenge was used as a place of ritual and that it also marked time because the winter solstice sunrise aligned with the center alter. The Nordic countries also selected the Winter Solstice as their new year and burned a Yule log which was round and symbolized a clock-like wheel. The word Yule evolved from the Saxon word “hweol” which meant wheel, and was a symbol of the yearly cycle of the sun.
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Another word that the Egyptians had for the Sun at high noon was Aten, which sounds very similar to the holy words Amen, Awen and Aum. We can only speculate that they all may have evolved from some common ground.
The Egyptians celebrated spring Equinox with a festival called Sham el-Nessim or Shom en nisim. It was named after Shemu which meant creation and nessim meant breath. Nessim translates to mean breath in the air of Creation. One cannot help but notice that Sham el Nessim seems to be related to the word Shamanism and Shaman.
It also seems related to the sun god Shamash of the Ancient Sumerians, the Babylonians and Assyrians.
Shamash was the Sun God and God of Justice.
This symbol was use around 1000 B.C. in the Euphrates-Tigris region to represent the sun and the sun god Shamash, the greatest power, or the highest divinity. Hammurabi is said to have credited the Sun, Shamash, for inspiring him to carve laws onto a huge stone tablet – because light was seen to reveal the injustice and wrong. The attribute most commonly associated with Shamash is justice. It was believed that Shamash brings wrong and injustice to light just as the sun disperses darkness. The ancient city of Beit Shemesh translates into house or temple of the Canaanite female sun goddess Shemesh. Perhaps Shemesh evolved into our word for female, she.
There is also an interesting relationship of the word Shamash to the 7 candled menorah of Judaism. The middle candle is called Shamash and to most modern Jews this simply means, “to be used” to light the other candles. This also correlates with the fact that the Star of David is almost the same as the seal of Solomon.
Star of David, Seal of Solomon
The name SOL-OM-ON is also a name for the Supreme Light. Both are a hexagram of two interlaced triangles. This is also found in Hinduism. The upward triangle is represented by Shiva the divine masculine energy. The downward triangle is the Shakti, the divine feminine energy.
In the ancient catacombs under Rome, are pictures of the virgin mother Isis, holding the baby Horus as a sun which is incredibly similar to the “Madonna and Child”. The Roman Pagan festival of Saturnalia, which included feasting, gambling, drinking and gift giving, was celebrated throughout Italy on the Winter Solstice in the north Hemisphere. It honored the God Saturn, began on Dec. 17th, and lasted until the Solstice on Dec. 25th. The God Saturn was also associated with Chronos who represented Time.
The Romans also celebrated the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, “the birthday of the unconquered sun.” on December 25, which was the solstice at the time. It was the day Sun proved itself to be “unconquered” despite the shortening of daylight hours. The celebration of Sol Invictus allowed several solar deities to be worshipped collectively, including Mithras.
Mithras’ symbol was a tauroctony, a representation of the constellations which included Scorpio and Taurus the Bull. which could be related to the golden calf. Mithraeums were underground cave like structures and have been discovered as far north as Germany, Hungary and the United Kingdom. Mithraism disappeared after the Theodosian decree of 391 banned all pagan rites. Perhaps Mithraeums are related also to Granges of the Nordic countries and the development of Stonehenge which aligned with the Sunrise on the Solstice. In several Nordic countries it is still common to wear a wreath crown of candles on St. Lucy’s Day, which, before the 16th century reform of the Gregorian calendar, occurred on the winter solstice. This ties in with the Sun being reborn on the Solstice, because in Roman mythology Lucina was the goddess of childbirth and also an epithet for Juno as “she who brings children into light”. Lucy and Lucina are related to our word for luminance.
© Copyright2009 Kelly Sabota-O’Donnell
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