About the Sacred Calendar
Welcome to Terra Lucida Institute’s SACRED CALENDAR series. This series will describe the sacred calendrical relationship to Time and Earth engaged in by cultures worldwide.
Since the beginning of human history all societies have engaged in measuring time. Even earlier than the Egypt of the pharaohs, the Babylonians, and Sumerians, and many thousands of years before our own western calendar was created, we know that tribal people all over the world studied the skies, the sun, moon, planets, and stars all of which provided a celestial map for measuring the passage of time throughout our existence. Ancient peoples’ keen observations of the regular patterns of movement over time of these celestial bodies across the sky led to the accurate determination of seasons, months, and years and most used the moon’s cycles to measure time. They created “time markers” on pieces of bone, stone or skins. From ancient times calendars were used to assist people to organize their lives, schedule their social obligations and religious ceremonies and record the passage of time including the key events that formed their historical experience. Today there are about forty calendars being used all over the world.
In early human experience there was no real distinction between their interest and observation of the skies as astronomers or astrologers. From the perspective of the ancient priest-philosopher, the scientific study of the sun, moon and stars was simply corollary knowledge that invited astrological interpretations that could explain the apparent effect of the heavenly bodies on human existence. The sky was understood universally by early human cultures as the abode of the gods who created the earth and whose personal engagement with human beings was reflected both in their profound influence on the human experience of life on earth and also in the celestial patterns and movements of the heavens.
Certainly the sky remains an incomprehensible reality even today but in ancient times extremes in temperature, weather, day and night, floods, droughts and earthquakes, disease and famine were all related to and ultimately derived from the sky gods who had to be engaged carefully, respectfully and with great courage if one wished for good crops, health, safety and security.
Ancient calendars in particular served as a link between humankind and the cosmos and held great importance as holy texts that contained a rich complex of traditional sacred wisdom and the religious history of a society. They were used as devices for divination and prophecy, for maintaining schedules of religious events and served as precious resource for the articulation of social order and cultural identity over the millennia. They were also an all-important planning tool that provided scheduling for agricultural management, seasonal animal migrations and related hunting practices.
Please enjoy the first volume of Terra Lucida Institute’s SACRED CALENDAR series that focuses on ancient Greco-Roman and Celtic calendrical traditions.