PART 1

From Sothic to Chaotic Calendars

The Modern Calendar

If we ask someone “What day is today?” it is usually not because we have forgotten in which year or month we live in, but rather what day of the week it is. Ever since we went to Kindergarten we know that a week has seven days, which keep repeating over and over in the same sequence as they have done for thousands of years. But sometimes we are so busy in our weekly routines that we hardly think about the fact that a certain day in a certain month of the year is actually more important for an accurate reckoning of time than the rule that a particular day of the week is called Sunday, for instance.

However, it wasn’t always like that. A little more than four centuries ago, the Fathers of the Church had a big problem on their hands. Relying on a lunar based solar calendar, they eventually noticed that their Easter Day, which they always wanted to celebrate on a Sunday following the fourteenth day of the paschal moon, whose fourteenth day followed the spring equinox, has diverged significantly from the latter. While this may sound like a religious problem; i.e. “primarily a matter of ecclesiastical discipline” as the Church has always maintained, it is in reality an astronomical problem. The Sun and the Moon in the heavens are not the same as the fictional Sun and the Moon of the calendar.

When in 325 CE [Common Era – AD] the Council of Nicaea already lay out some of the rules and principles regarding the celebration of Easter, the spring equinox did, in fact, occur on or around March 21st as it does nowadays. This was not one of those infamous astronomical coincidences, as we shall see later, but the result of careful astronomical observations in the past and a knowledge that has been lost.

For almost another 1300 years, as the world passed through some of its darkest ages, the established lunar-solar calendar of 365.25 days slowly diverged from the day of the spring equinox, which people in ancient times had always regarded as an auspicious day.
Monuments, dating back to prehistoric times can tell us still today the exact position of the equinoxes and the solstices. But over many thousands of years, with the deterioration of ancient stellar cults down from solar cults to lunar cults, the knowledge of how to keep track of solar-sidereal time almost completely vanished, especially it seems during the period from around 200 CE to 1582 CE (the year of the Calendar Reform).

It appears mankind was just too busy destroying each other. When through their periodic processes of war and invasions the soldiers of faith and fortune happened to stumble across genuine ancient knowledge, no sooner said than done was it burned and eradicated along with its former possessors. Even if some of the early invaders had “discovered” the great pyramid of Chichén-Itzá, they would have had no clue that this magnificent and ingenious monument represents more than a device to accurately observe the cycle of the equinoxes – hidden in the jungle it truly represented a symbol of a lost wisdom. Because long before medieval Europe conquered Mesoamerica, the ancestors of the Mayan possessed a functional calendar system that accounted for the minute yet crucial time difference that occurs between a year of 365.25 days and the actual solar year.

Scholars have unearthed, studied and interpreted as much as they could find, and when there was a lack of evidence or knowledge, Gods and myths served as explanations until only symbols, religious calendars, rituals and places of cult worship remained. While the real significance of the Mayan calendar seems to have been lost, we cannot deny the fact that it employs the same fundamental 4-year leap system that applies to our modern calendar. But in order to achieve greater accuracy over longer time frames, the ancient calendar makers discovered mathematical combinations and devised an ingenious system of leap-days that makes our modern calendar look primitive in comparison. They were fully aware of the fact that a solar year does not consist of 365.25 days or more, as there is strong evidence that they established a leap-day system that required the omission of one day approximately every 128.18 solar years.

Calendars are chronological instruments to count days, weeks, months and years. However, without a precise knowledge of the fundamental time period, which forms the mathematical basis of the calendar system, the names given to days and groups of days have no meaning compared to the old astrological symbols. The basic unit for calculating time is the period it takes for Earth to make a complete revolution around the Sun. This time interval is the so-called tropical year, and modern observations have shown that it consists of 365.24219878 mean solar days.

And it is solely because of this difference; i.e. one day in about 128.18 solar years - that the 21st of March in Europe’s old Julian calendar no longer occurred at the time of the vernal equinox. The reason it took the Church so long to correct it was in the end not so much a failure of making out the mistake itself, but rather a failure of understanding the reason for it and of course, a lack of knowledge of how to correct it.

In 1582 CE, with the help of a clever mathematician named Christophorus Clavius, the old-style calendar was finally corrected by 10 days, i.e. the accumulated astronomical time difference of one day every 128.18 years. A simple calculation proves that the solar calendar was correct until shortly before 300 CE:

1582 – (10 × 128.2) = 300

In order to avoid a similar mishap, certain rules of intercalations were introduced to keep our civil calendar more or less in synch with Earth’s solar or tropical year (at least for the next 3000 years or so).

The Ancient Egyptian Calendar

Regardless, we cannot blame early medieval Europeans for not knowing anything about advanced cultures that lived across oceans and beyond high mountain ranges. They could not destroy things that did not exist for them. Unfortunately, the situation was a lot different for a country called Egypt. It was easily accessible, as Alexander the Great had demonstrated so effectively prior to the times of the Romans and the Crusaders.

Historians inform us about all the glorious and gory details of the “tribal conflicts” that occurred, and a special branch of them, the Egyptologists, have specialized in that part of our history that deals exclusively with the culture of Ancient Egypt; commonly referred to as the Dynastic period or the Egypt of the Pharaohs.

In the past, many valuable discoveries have been made by archeologists, geologists and other fields of science including astronomy. Some Egyptologists still rely on excavations of pottery and other objects and are suspicious of mathematically dating the reigns of Kings and Pharaohs based on astronomical phenomena. Others, together with a number of scientists and researchers have formed a new branch of science, called archeo-astronomy. Thanks to the efforts of various independent researchers over the last few decades, and especially during the recent one, a new understanding of the knowledge of ancient (and more importantly pre-dynastic) Egypt gradually emerges from the sand – i.e. the sand that was thrown into our eyes. Because for some reason it was astronomers, and not necessarily Egyptologists, that set the course of events. According to them, the ancient Egyptians completely lacked any astronomical knowledge.

For instance, the scholar and astronomer Otto Neugebauer believed that "…there is no astronomical phenomenon which possibly could impress on the mind of a primitive observer that a lunar month lasts 30 days and a solar year contains 365 days. Observation during one year is sufficient to convince anybody that in about six cases out of twelve the moon repeats all its phases in only 29 days and never in more than 30; and forty years' observation of the sun (e.g., of the dates of the equinoxes) must make it obvious that the year fell short by 10 days! The inevitable consequence of these facts is, it seems to me, that every theory of the origin of the Egyptian calendar which assumes an astronomical foundation is doomed to failure…..I still think that this theory is in perfect agreement with the structure of the Egyptian calendar, which has only three seasons, admittedly agricultural and not astronomical, and which has no reference to Sothis at all."

O. Neugebauer, "The Origins of the Egyptian Calendar", JNES 1 (1942), 397-403

Neugebauer imagined that a period of 240 years was needed to establish a year of 365 days based on the periodic flooding of the river Nile (a hypothesis which already presumes that the duration of the year is 365 days!). The flooding did not always make its first appearance on a fixed day - even today the fluctuations run over a period of six weeks and more (Neugebauer himself admitted that it can vary by as much as 60 days).

However, wishing to deduce an establishment of a Sothic year of 365.25 days based on the flooding of the Nile in relation to the remarkable astronomical phenomenon of the helical rising of Sirius is in the words of the Egyptologist R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, "a feat of skill which would dignify clairvoyance rather than ratiocination."

R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, “Sacred Science”, Inner Traditions (1982)

At this point it would be interesting to mention that Otto Neugebauer, who wrote extensively about Babylonian astronomy, also discussed the so-called Solstice-Equinox-Sirius texts, which formed part of the “Astronomical Diaries”. These texts list equinoxes, solstices, heliacal risings and settings of Sirius from the period of around 600 BCE and around 330 BCE. Apparently, the position of Sirius relative to the solstices and equinoxes did not change over time with precession. Neugebauer therefore, concludes: "This is, incidentally, further evidence for the fact that the Babylonian astronomers were not aware of the existence of precession."

Otto Neugebauer, “A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy” (Part 1, Page 543, Note 13)

We will see that Neugebauer could not have been any further from the truth - already for the ancient Egyptians, Sirius did not show any precession.

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