mwolf@yale-com.UUCP (Anne G. Wolf) (09/20/83)
There is a version of the history of calendars that I heard
about somewhere. I'm not sure how much of it is true, so let's just
treat it as an interesting myth.
When the dominant religion was the worship of Mother Earth, the
original calendar had 13 months of 28 days. There were 4 weeks in
each month. This fit with the cycles of the moon and with women's
periods. 13 months * 28 days / month is 364. This left one extra
Since women fit into this cycle, and men did not, a man was
sacrificed on that extra day.
It would be understandable that men would not like this system.
When the dominant religion became the worship of G*d the Father
(or of a pantheon with a male thunder-god at the top),
the number of months and the lengths of the months were changed
to erase the old system. People who had months named after them
increased the lengths of their months, which is how we got months
of 30 or 31 days. (Examples in the Roman system include July, after
Julius Caesar, and August, after Augustus Caesar)
Also, the more recent sacrifices in western culture have been women,
especially young (prepubescent?) women (E.g. dragons demanded
princesses whom heros sometimes rescued in return for half the girl's
father's kingdom.)
Although this may be a myth, it does explain a number of things:
that "moon" is feminine in most language that have gender
(with the exception of German and maybe others),
that "month" and "moon" come from similar roots,
that 13 is unlucky (for men),
that we have 7-day weeks,
that we still speak of "quarters" of the moon (the amount of
change in one week, thus, a quarter of a month), although
the change in the moon is continuous, and it would make
as much sense to talk of thirds or fifths,
and that the current system of irregular-length months is
completely useless for any woman to keep track of her period.
Has anyone else heard of this system? Did it actually exist?
Mary-Anne Wolf (decvax!yale-comix!mwolf)ecn-ec:ecn-pc:ecn-ed:vu@pur-ee.UUCP (09/22/83)
yale-com!mwolf: that "moon" is feminine in most languages that have gender. Another nice thing is that in Chinese custom of dividing everything in to Yin and Yang, women and moon are together in the Yin side, as opposed to men and sun in the Yang side. [Here, saying nice I mean interesting. So no flame about it please] Hao-Nhien Vu (pur-ee!norris)