THE LUNAR CALENDAR

I’ve been puzzling about how and why the lunar year turned into the solar year. The idea of starting the new year around the Winter Solstice and counting thirteen 28-day lunar months seems somehow more “natural” and nature-connected than the convoluted Julian calendar Western culture still uses.

I was fascinated to read in Wikipedia that “as a religious tradition, the thirteen-month years survived among European peasants for more than a millennium after the adoption of the Julian Calendar.” I wonder why…

The natural lunar cycle is intimately connected with the female menstrual cycle and other earthy and planetary influences. As Heather Witham points out to us in her Moon Letters, losing touch with the moon’s cycles seems to separate us from awareness of, connection with and reverence for both nature and the deep feminine. And the number 13, of course, has come in the Christian era to have all sorts of frightening connotations, so no good patriarch would advocate a return to such an ominous system.

How does the Julian calendar affect us psychologically, spiritually, practically? What would change if we all reverted to the lunar calendar? I’d love to hear your thoughts…

Comments

[Nancy Doyle]

I have often wondered how one person "a King" "A President" "a spiritual leader" has so much clout to change a whole universal way of life and it happens. For example, the 2nd world war changed the times of the day by an hour. Here we are many years later still changing the hour. Personally, my biological clock works best with the hour in the morning.When clocks are turned back to where they were forever. When the clocks are turned forward I really feel the effects biologically. I hear they (the powers that be) are wanting to change it to be forward all the time. You are right is there any way we as people can have a voice to come back to the natural way of life. I personally believe we are all longing to be free of effects of the way life has evolved in a stressful, instant gratification kind of living. I'm of a mindset that we are on that course. More of civilization is waking up to wanting to live a more open free way of living not on the outside, but from within.
Open to re-experience their connection to what is really truth in living. Curiousity, being in a space of dreaming and creating a way to feel what is in the heart and responding from there. Going out from the center of our being and coming back from the outside to the center of our being. Thanks for this opportunity to express what it in my heart. Nancy Doyle

[Linda Buzzell-Saltzman]

Hi Nancy,

Thanks for your comment. Yes, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could get back to "nature's time" rather than industrial time?